When your business is located near a remote bay of Lake Superior, you place a great deal of trust in your systems support team. For CertainTeed Products located in L’Anse, Upper Michigan, service and trust were key components to building a dependable automated system.
John Madajewski, Project Engineer, traces his relationship with Trident Automation back to 1998—and he still has Don Jolly’s business card from that year before he started with Trident Automation. The CertainTeed plant in L’Anse produces ceiling tiles. The plant is a long way from Trident’s offices in Wisconsin.
He likes to tell the story of one 4th of July weekend in 2007 when a computer died during the annual plant shut down and he immediately called Jason Hurst, CEO of Trident. “He dug a computer out of his office, drove up to L’Anse on a holiday weekend, got the system up and running and the plant didn’t miss a beat,” Madajewski said.
The DCS platform at CertainTeed is used to streamline operations and share information.
“Our two businesses have grown up together,” Madajewski said. “Trident originally built our systems in Excel to track things like downtime and scrap use, then we moved to a DCS platform. My original system had two operator stations, now there are 14.” He says the original DCS system is still in use with annual upgrades and reporting functions all designed for efficiency.
“The beauty is anyone in our company can see information. I don’t care where you are in the company, anyone can get at all our reporting, current information, contractor status, event shipments,” Madajewski said.
He admits to a level of proficiency with the DCS platform, but for continued innovations, fine tuning, and upgrades, he relies on years of experience that’s just one phone call away at Trident.
For more information on how Trident Automation can assist with your needs, contact [email protected].
Leave a Reply