Episode 5: A Celebration of STEM in Industry with Chief Operating Officer

Transcript

Welcome to BLaST the Airwaves with BLaST Intermediate Unit 17. Here at BLaST Intermediate Unit 17, we strive to transform lives and communities through educational services. For this season, we have a special guest co-host who is working to create and sustain pathways to employment in our region by uniting her community around common goals in STEM learning. This season’s guests come from 9 counties total, representing different local industries all across Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania. I’d like to introduce you to Alexandra Konsur-Grushinski, STEM Services Coordinator for NEIU 19 and current lead of NEPA STEM Ecosystem. Alexandra, welcome! Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be able to work with you for our Celebration of STEM in Industry this year. Our STEM Ecosystem is holding a weeklong series of free events and opportunities highlighting industry partners and the benefits they have in our 5 county region. Our hope is that by listening to the wide variety of employment opportunities available in our region from folks in our community who live it every day, we can shed a light on what’s possible for our young people. On this podcast, we will provide you with educational solutions and resources for all, no matter the learning environment. So teachers, administrators, students, caregivers, industry partners, what are you waiting for? What would happen if we started questioning? What if our students and educators got the opportunities to sit down with members of the community? What if we bridged that gap? What connections would we discover? It’s time to blast the airwaves.
Rebecca: Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Mark Anicelli, Chief Operating Officer at Bayard Printing Group and Alexandra Konsur-Grushinski, STEM Services Coordinator at NEIU 19 and current lead of NEPA STEM Ecosystem. Mark, Alexandra thank you so much for joining us today to discuss STEM skills used specifically Mark, in your industry.
Mark: Thank you for having me.
Rebecca: Yeah. We’re excited to discuss how knowledge of STEM skills are important in your current job position. So are you both ready to Blast the Airwaves?
Mark: We are.
Alexandra: Yes.
Rebecca: Wonderful. So Mark, why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit more about your role in industry.
Mark: Ok. The Bayer Printing Group is a supplier of publications, periodicals and printing. We have our own direct mail processing center and a US Postal Service Substation. We direct mail nearly 60 million pieces a year. We serve the mid atlantic region with our innovative solutions and our top customer service focus. Our main printing includes both digital printing and high-speed, heat-set web printing. Our digital printing is one of the most advanced digital printing on the market. It allows us the ability to order the exact or our customers to order exactly what they need from a handful to a truckload. It allows us to be super responsive both date and deadline-wise. For medium to high volume work, we have the efficiency of quality, high-speed heat-set web printing. Web presses print on continuous rolls of paper, rather than printing on individual sheets of paper as the sheet-fed press does. This allows us a much higher printing speed and consistent high quality of heat set is ideal for printing publications like newspapers, periodicals and catalogs. Really any high-volume print project. We also produce screens for screen printing, and we have a very high-end and technical pre-press in store front development team. We maintain our own delivery fleet that allows us delivery 24/7. I am the Chief Operating Officer of the Organization, often called the COO. In this role I manage the day-to-day operations of nearly 90 persons, multiple facility operations. I think our total square footage would be around 100,000 square feet when you combine the operations. I report to the President, Mark Lunberg who resides here in Williamsport. I am also one of the owners of several local businesses in town where I was the vice president and managing partner for. I’m active in the community, serving on several boards such as Hope Enterprises and the IMC which is the Industrial Modernization Center.
Rebecca: Yeah I forgot Mark to mention earlier that you guys are located right down the road from us actually at BLaST here in Lycoming County in Williamsport. Is this your only location, or do you have other locations as well?
Mark: We have a location in Plymouth Pennsylvania.
Rebecca: Ok. I couldn’t remember about that. So many things you guys have!
Mark: Thank you.
Alexandra: So, Mark. I want to dig a little bit into what you mentioned sort of in your response earlier about what your day-to-day responsibilities are. So, could you describe a day in the life of Mark at work for us to give us an idea of what that looks like.
Mark: Sure. So, I typically arrive between 6 and 7 am. I’m an early riser so I really enjoy this. It gives me a chance to meet with the employees on the off shift. I usually start with a coffee like most people do. And some news to make sure I’m on top of things that maybe are affecting our business. Particularly these days, I always try to look up what’s happening with Covid and right now the supply chain. Those are our biggest business challenges. Once I get that first cup of coffee down, I cruise the shop. We have dry erase boards and computers. The department managers use these to update on key statistics. So I cruise around, kind of look at how we’ve done. How did we do the night before? Did we hit our goals? Did we reach the accomplishments that we hoped to have? I like to chat with people. I can gauge how we are doing by seeing these people and seeing how they respond to me or not. Three times a week we have a staff meeting where we monitor the schedule, our objectives. Also three times a week the different facilities that we have meet on a conference call mostly to find out about where we are with regard to Covid. We are very nervous about that and it maybe taking our business down. So we are always trying to stay up on top of that making sure we are cross-training and preventing downtime as it relates to that. I think what’s different today versus the past is we are trying to drive this continual improvement much more these days than maybe when we look back maybe 25 years ago. So those charts that I’m talking about or reports on that computers, they’re all about are we getting better? Are we improving? The big term that we use is lean, continual improvement. So we’re looking at those things on a daily basis making sure that our yields are better. Making sure that our automation is doing as well as it can. We have just started to see AI enter our equipment, Artificial Intelligence. So we have a color-management close looped feedback system. What his system does is it monitors what we do each run. How we set up. What we do and it applies those things that it’s learning, and we can start up much faster on jobs. So, it’s very modern. It’s happening very fast. And it is very exciting.
Alexandra: It’s interesting to hear you talk about AI in this field. It also sounds like you are making a lot of data-driven decisions as well.
Mark: Yes. It is.
Alexandra: So that’s good to hear also.
Rebecca: Yeah I think Lexie from some of the other episodes we’ve heard in talking with our other community partners. It’s interesting because everyday you are checking for improvement and if you are meeting your goals. But I feel like industry places so much more of an importance on that. Hearing you Mark saying you guys meet three times a week. I think about in Education we meet maybe at a department meeting or here and there sometimes. It’s just different in the priority there. I think it’s fascinating to hear how you guys manage different growth and goal meetings. So awesome Mark thank you.
Mark: Thank you.
Rebecca: If you were, and you and I have talked about this, Mark. If you were a high school student or a middle school student, I’m looking to enter this field. And let’s say I come and I want to interview with you. What would be some recommendations you would give a middle school student or a high school student to start preparing them for a journey to a job in your field.
Mark: Well I like to look at my career path maybe as a way to look at things. I was maybe a little different than folks. In high school they thought I was going to fail and what we had was called a trade school and the next thing you know I got whisked off to go onto this trade school. We got to save him. He’s gonna fail. Cuz I really wasn’t, I didn’t see the interest in the college or books at the time. So I started my career at a trade school in junior year. And what was interesting is I started almost full-time work as an electronic technician. And about 16 years later, the company I first started at, by the way I was making $3.29 cents an hour.
Alexandra: Oh my! (laughs)
Mark: I was eventually running that whole operation and having assignments around the globe. And we were acquiring businesses and I got to manage those or move them around so I was very blessed. I thought about a lot of how that happened for me, and I think one of the things was I had been able to pick up on people that would mentor me. And maybe those people saw I was interested in being mentored and it kind of came together. So I had over the years many people that helped me, gave me the opportunity. I saw the need for education. I went to school nights. While I was at night I remember seeing more senior people from the company I worked with going to school nights and I thought boy, that guy is by the way maybe as old as I am now, but I was a young man and I thought boy I’d better get this out of the way now or I’m going to be like Joe over there. But what I think I also found is that these people were mentoring me also pushed me to do the things that maybe I wouldn’t ordinarily do otherwise and it was it made me uncomfortable to go to school. But I did. They made it just uncomfortable enough to make me want to improve. To make me want to go into areas that I was uncomfortable. But the fact that they pushed me and helped me really was something. But because of that I feel now, I like to do what those folks did to me. I like to mentor other people. I like to mentor people at work. I network. I network with other business leaders. We like to speak to schools and students. So I really like it; it’s really helped me and I think it’s maybe a teaching aspect you end up developing from that experience. So, thank you.
Alexandra: I love that you’ve made it a priority to mentor the next generation. That’s I think telling as to the type of person you are and how you run your business and everything about it.
Mark: Well, I think it says something about the people who mentored me. I think they ended up being my role models, and I think about them all the time because I have a lot of things that I probably wouldn’t have if they hadn’t spent the time with me.
Rebecca: So, if you were thinking about we’re talking about STEM, Celebrating STEM in Industry, what are some skills that you see with your staff and with yourself that your employees use everyday that are STEM skills?
Mark: Well I think all of the skills are important, certainly numbers and math, understanding the relationship of numbers allows us to know the yields. Are we doing better? Are we doing worse? What are the leading defects? Are we profitable or not? Where are there efficiencies or not? Collecting and reviewing data allows us to get into problem-solving. Without knowing how to read and measure things, we’re not going to do a good job of finding the things that maybe are problems therefore we wouldn’t solve the problems so that’s important. Another big one that I think helps us, that maybe sets us apart from competitors is being creative, being able to see things in different ways. I think that is a bit of a STEM skill as well. As I mentioned, this AI that’s going on, that’s an automated kind of program that uses much the same skills as people would, and numbers and problem-solving. So it’s kind of interesting that they work hand in hand. So that’s kind of where I stand on the STEM.
Rebecca: I think it’s interesting because when I talk to teachers and I talk with students, everyone gets so afraid that oh robots are going to take the job or artificial intelligence. Because it is more efficient. However, what humans can do that robots can’t is the problem-solving the creativity. We can code them to do these things but we still need the humans to have the problem-solving skills and the creativity. And working with you in the past, I know it’s always that human capacity that you value. It’s always interesting to think about that.
Mark: Well I think that people find the ways to use those tools, and that’s what gives you the edge if you can be creative about using those things, I think it’ll give you an edge.
Rebecca: For sure.
Alexandra: So Mark, I think I heard some of the answers to this question in your previous response, but I want to help maybe put more of a fine point on it for our listeners. So what skills do you yourself use everyday that our students in our PreK-12 space are learning in school? And those could be subjects. Those could be specific skills, concepts, you name it, it can be part of this question and so can you just let us know some of those that you see happening in your daily life at work that students are learning in school.
Mark: Most of the businesses and most of my background has been in what’s called operations and that’s where we are making things. And in that environment, the things that are important that I actually think kids learn in school, one of them is being punctual. If people aren’t punctual in our environment, we might have a four-million-dollar press that can’t run. That press is making prints. It’s printing at maybe 34,000 prints an hour. If somebody is late, that’s a lot of stuff that’s not printing. So, punctuality is really important. The other thing that maybe is a skill is at school is math. And very basic math because many workers have to fill out time cards, they have to report on yields, they have to report on the equipment. And so understanding math is very important. Making sure you are getting paid correctly is probably important as well for people. I think another thing that you learn in school is getting along with people. Getting along with your teachers, getting along with students, some that you like, some that you don’t maybe. But at work you all have to work together, and at school you all have to be in school together So I think that’s maybe an important skill that maybe you don’t realize is happening, but it is and so I don’t know how big classrooms are these days but they’re probably not much unlike the work environment. People might be in groups of ten, twenty and we all have to get along. Same thing in school. I think those are kind of some important ones to me.
Rebecca: Again, Lexie, so interesting. Some of our other industry partners, they pick out those same skills, those same kinds of learning that students should be taking from the classroom.
Alexandra: Definitely some parallels there that we are finding.
Rebecca: Fantastic.
Mark: Well I think we do a better job though.
Alexandra and Rebecca: (laugh)
Rebecca: So now it’s time for my favorite part. It’s the Blast Five and we are just going to blast you with, normally it’s five different questions, but for you Mark, we are going to ask you one question and if you could share with us what do you think are the top five skills needed for your industry specifically.
Mark: Ok. I think number one is for people to be open and flexible. Their mind. Number two I would say is to have passion and interest. That will help people endure the peaks and valleys that are normal in business. Number three: dependability. If you are dependable, I think a business is more apt to invest in you. And number four: the ability to constantly learn and apply what you are learning. If you learn but you don’t apply it, it’s not going to help you very much. It’s certainly not going to help the employer. And number five: drive. Having the drive and a mindset that doesn’t give up I think will help a student, it will help career people to accomplish things and to be very successful. I think people look for drive in all different ways. I think it’s important one. Those are my five!
Alexandra: Love them, Mark. I don’t even think I could rank them if I needed to. I love them all.
Rebecca: I love the drive one. There’s a book out right now that’s called Drive. I can’t remember who the author is though.
Alexandra: There is.
Rebecca: It’s a good book though. Anyways Mark, it has been a Blast, no pun intended, hanging out with you for this podcast today. We celebrate you and what you do everyday in STEM. Again, thank you for taking the time to connect with us and our listeners. What we will do is we will provide contact information that you want to provide for us. We will put that in our show notes, on our website and on Lexie’s ecosystem website so our listeners can connect with you.
Mark: Thank you very much for the opportunity that you’ve given us. Thank you.
Rebecca: Yeah it’s been a pleasure. And I’m sure you and I will definitely speaking soon. Thank you.
Alexandra: Thank you, Mark.
We would like to thank you for blasting the airwaves with us today. If you like the show, please subscribe or leave a review. If you want to know more, check out www.iu17.org for further resources and show notes. If you’d like to learn more about NEPA STEM Ecosystem and the work we are doing in STEM and job pathways, please visit them at www.nepastem.org. As always, we want to thank you for what you do every single day. Remember, keep shining. We’ll be back next episode to provide you another educational solutions for all, as we continue to transform lives and communities through educational services.