I have had a great week in Parking. I spend Monday dinner with Marilyn Etheridge in Tampa. She has joined the PIE crew to help bring attendees to the event. More about that later.
On Tuesday I met with Mike Harley, President of SMC software. He’s a straight forward guy who tell you what he believes. He has an interesting product and approach to marketing it. He will be joining us at PIE.
On Wednesday I spend the afternoon with 3M, Chad Reed and Aaron Mills and the folks at their manufacturing operation in Austin. They have an impressive plant, mostly from the six sigma culture they bring to bear on the process. Factoid: 3M is one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones industrial stock average. I will be writing more about 3M in the January issue of PT.
This morning, I was in Cincinnati, or rather Loveland, OH, and toured Amano McGann’s manufacturing operation with Joe Survance, AM’s VP of Marketing, and the managers who run the plant. I was impressed with the size and smoothness of the operation. The most impressive factoid: They product one parking product (gate, TD, Reader, POF) every 20 minutes, every day 24/7/365. That’s a really big number. More about this in January, too.
This week has been interesting, enlightening, and in a couple of cases, humbling. Its great to meet people who really know what they are doing. I’ll talk more about this in future posts.
JVH
