Marvin reviews

Proceed at the expense of your own career and sanity. Accept if you are desperate or have a couple years to kill. A couple other things, too... If you are new to working in industry, TruStile Northwood is a great place to spend a couple years observing a living case study for inefficient, wasteful, and poor-quality manufacturing with nearly all of its upper leadership shining products of the Peter Principle. You can and will experience important lessons the hard way while wasting time and money as weak, incompetent, and unqualified Leadership/Operations Management team (from here on referred to as ‘Leadership’) constantly make gut/rash decisions in lieu of listening to properly degreed and certified experts on their own team, the Leadership constantly exhibit consistent poor and sloppy management of resources from people, to materials, to money, place little to no value on basic data regarding production health and capacity in any manner producing low/no visibility to what is actually happening on their own production floor, and a toxic front office culture rewards boot lickers content with complacency instead of people who want to work as a team and raise the bar for quality, efficiency, and quality of life for operators. While touring the facility for an interview, or out of curiosity in what you should not do in modern manufacturing, point at a random machine at any time and ask your tour guide, “For this machine in particular, what is your first pass yield in the past year? What is this machine’s overall equipment effectiveness for the previous shift? What is this machine’s average daily up-time for the past month? What are the top 5 quality issues for the past quarter, in terms of instances or quantities, and in correlating monetary value that this machine experiences, and can you show me on a Pareto graph? What is the theoretical max capacity of this machine in an hour? How many operators should work on this machine for max efficiency? What is your labor rate and calculated overhead per hour?” You will be lucky if you get any answer besides a blank stare and/or a confused response, and any numbers can be assumed to be false as they have no current or reliable way to track any of these standard metrics for manufacturing that have existed industry-wide for the last 30+ years. Lots of really useful data is actually collected on a daily basis manually on paper (and after a production supervisor glances at the paper without taking in what’s on it or entering it in anywhere, will promptly toss it in the trash), yet Leadership and managers place little value in any data and very few understand basic statistics, no one has the time or skills to enter manual production data into a basic database or even an excel file, little automated data is collected from machines besides manual scans from operators and IT/IS guards the raw data opting to distribute portions of the entire set it in limited reports obfuscating critical trends and signals of problems. On a few occasions I witnessed managers blindly slapping buzzwords on random things they were doing, like ‘Six Sigma’, with zero understanding of what the method is or what the buzzword they’re using means. Collecting basic data on anything takes weeks to months, and when finally compiled into graphs, stats, or models, the Leadership has no idea what they are looking at, so they disregard it, and opt for their own unsupported guesses on what to do concerning critical production road blocks. Meaningful change and large-scale projects to improve processes are constantly nixed without any reason or feedback from the Leadership, daily priorities are constantly flip flopped (very much in the style of ‘flavor of the day’) making for a confusing, unfulfilling, and depressing day to day work experience. Providing Leadership possible monetary gains or savings regarding proposed process improvements is useless as they cannot make the basic conversion from monetary values to physical doors; I really wish I was kidding in this case, but I experienced it firsthand numerous times and had promising proposals denied because someone making upper five- or six-figures cannot do basic math. Leadership and some upper-level managers have great difficulty calculating ROIs for their projects and stumble explaining their work, but it doesn’t matter because they will be approved to spend thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars without question and without a basic gate review process as they are buddies with the executives (and the executives holding the purse strings don’t double check anything); good luck if you’re lower down on the totem pole where they won’t even listen to your ROI calculation explanation, even if it’s solid and under 6-months. Many outdated and unsafe machines well past their End of Life exist on the production floor that operators are thrown on with little or no training, and leadership has little to no interest in investment into areas that need the most attention within the facility. Controlled documents are a completely foreign concept and many machines have no SOP, Written Work Instructions, or easily accessible list of relevant standards or tolerances. Quality of the product is frequently dismissed in favor of getting close to (not meeting or exceeding) daily production numbers which comes back to bite everyone (primarily Operators, meaning working overtime on Fridays and Saturdays) later in terms of warranties, remakes, etc, and few of the Leadership seem to care. Some of the production supervisors barely leave their desk during the day, have no idea what occurs in their areas, and are quick to blame Operators for issues they (the supervisors) themselves should have caught and worked through. Instead of actual managing, many managers and the Leadership spend the majority of their day in constant, meaningless, and unproductive meetings accomplishing nothing, which often end up in off-topic chit chatting instead of being out on the floor working towards the daily goals. If you show any sort of competence in your job, you will be asked to take on additional responsibilities without additional compensation, with the excuse that TruStile is a 'small company', it is not; leadership likes to take advantage of employees and their skillsets to save money, TruStile currently generates $100+ million annually (I have no idea who buys our doors, I personally would not witnessing the quality first-hand), and the broader Marvin Windows and Doors Company it is owned by generates $1+ billion annually. Little to no upwards career movement/progression possibilities besides lateral department shifts, unless you are willing to grovel and kiss the boots of the leadership and executives, and even then, you will likely be rewarded with mild favoritism instead of an actual career path. Little/extremely minimal investment into developing employees' skillsets. I was never provided with an actual career path for Engineering within TruStile.