Engineering and Racing: 30 Years of Automation with Dave Foster

In this episode of Down with OEE, Sam Hoff sits down with Patti Engineering Vice-President of Engineering and Operations, Dave Foster to reflect on 30 years of collaboration, innovation, and fast-paced problem-solving. They discuss the parallels between competitive car-racing and system integration. Sharing stories from the track, the shop floor, and the early days of Patti Engineering, Dave reflects on rewarding projects, tough customers, and the value of complementary skills in business.

The transcript below is available for those who prefer to read along. Please be aware that it may contain minor errors.

Sam Hoff:

Hello, this is Sam Hoff. Welcome to our podcasting series Down with OEE. I have a very special guest today, Dave Foster, who’s the VP of Operations at Patti Engineering. Dave, you and I have known each other and worked together just a couple years. In fact, last Thursday we took you and your lovely bride, Cindy and Patti and I went out for a great meal to celebrate 30 years.

Dave Foster:

Yeah, it was a good meal. It was a really good meal.

Sam Hoff:

Little plug for Rudy’s in downtown Clarkston. Robert Esshaki has done a great job of transforming that place from a little local market into just an awesome steakhouse.

Dave Foster:

Yeah, 30 years. I mean, it’s unbelievable. I mean, that word tends to be overused, but I think in this case it applies.

Sam Hoff:

Why don’t you share the story a little bit about how we met?

Dave Foster:

Yeah, so when I was in college electrical engineering degree up at GMI at the time, it’s Kettering University now. A bunch of buddies, Mike and I, we’ve always been car nuts. I’ve always been an absolute car nut, today hasn’t changed, and there was an opportunity to get involved in a hybrid electric vehicle concept before anybody knew what that was. This is back in the early pushing and mid nineties, and so through GMI, we converted a 1991 Saturn into a hybrid electric vehicle from scratch. A bunch of college students competed in different places around the country and were invited to the auto show in Detroit, which was fraction of what it turned into in following decades. But back then it was a fairly simple show and in the basement were all the oddballs, conversion vans and colleges and yeah, we were down there with GMI and Sam and Patti were checking out the auto show in 1995 and you guys first met one of my roommates who actually he still works for Stellantis to this day.

That’s where he went to work and guys were talking about the car. We had an Allen-Bradley SLC 500 in the trunk controlling Saturn because at the time the president of Rockwell was involved, it was GMI, so we were able to get it donated or it was Mc and Mc actually was the distributor. It was the president of Mc and Mc at the time, and we had a PanelView 550 and a SLC 500 in the trunk, and I think it’s what caught your eye plus the alumni thing and met you guys and it all started there. It all started at the auto show in Detroit, the basement.

Sam Hoff:

Yep, I remember that well. Patti and I were in the basement. We saw the PanelView in the dash where the radio would normally sit, we’re like, who are the double Es on this project?

Dave Foster:

Yep, Willie, Will Hubler is his name. You guys met him and then he had already committed to going to work for Chrysler. He’s still there. And at the time I was working down in Grand Cayman, my co-op was with Caribbean Utilities Company. It was funny, I’d never even thought about going into controls as a career. Certainly did a lot of it on that project, but my training was actually all in power systems, high voltage generation and transmission systems doing utility work. And that’s where I thought my career was going to go. But lo and behold, you never know what the future holds.

Sam Hoff:

You spent a lot of years in Grand Cayman with your dad down there and went to high school there and that kind of stuff. What a beautiful place.

Dave Foster:

Yeah, originally from northern Michigan, from Cadillac is where I was born, and then one of the many recessionary times here in America, it was in the early eighties, and my dad had his own business. He had his own plumbing and heating business, so just like a solo contractor kind of thing. And then business was really slow and he had a buddy who had just taken a job down in Grand Cayman running a construction company. Grand Cayman was going through a huge construction boom in the early eighties and he was just like, “Hey, I need all the help I can get.” My dad’s like, “well, we need all the money we can get.” So my dad and I – you date stuff like Google and Google Maps and we’re like, where’s Grand Cayman? So we bought a National Geographic at the drugstore that had a map of the Caribbean in it so we could figure out where we were going.

A foldout map. Yeah, we stored everything. We each had two suitcases is what my dad limited us to. I had two suitcases, he had two suitcases and we hopped on a Republic Airlines flight. It was quite a leap of faith. Went down to Grand Cayman, spent the first, I think two months, three months, we actually lived in a motel while we were looking for a place to stay. I was actually attending class out of, my dad and I were staying in a beautiful little oceanside motel, and we would have dinner every night at the poolside bar. It was an interesting way to start our experience down there. I was like, what? 11 years old or something off we went, graduated high school down there, worked for the power company down there, but it’s a British island. I had to have a work permit to work down there.

The politics of foreign workers versus domestic workers and all that is pretty universal and it became difficult to continue getting my work permit and I just knew that I’m like, “Nah, I really want to start my career back in the US.” And I had chosen Flint. Really what attracted me to GMI more than anything was the co-op program. That ability to go back and forth just really intrigued me. I love the hands-on aspect of everything we do. So that drew me up there and I’m like, “you know what? It just makes sense. I’m from Michigan originally,” and then I met you guys at the auto show, 30 years later, here we are.

Sam Hoff:

Yeah, and I think your lovely bride, Cindy might’ve had something to do with you wanting to settle back in Michigan as well.

Dave Foster:

Well, yeah. I think in the end what’s funny is she was all on board to move down there. I mean, she flew down many times when I was in college and once we knew we were going to get married, she interviewed – she was originally going to be a teacher, it didn’t end up going down that path, but she had interviewed with some schools down there and was going to become a teacher down there. But again, it was just sort of that same, and honestly, if it weren’t for that, maybe how my life would’ve turned out. But the political climate at that time, you’re talking ’94 probably at this point, it was very, very difficult to the work permit situation and all that. And we just looked at each other and this is not… all the signs are pointing us this isn’t the right thing. And then yeah, why here? Definitely, I mean because her family was from here, certainly this whole area of southeast Michigan. So yeah, that definitely had a big influence once we realized Grant Cayman was out.

Sam Hoff:

Now fast forward 30 years later, you and Cindy have two wonderful sons and some pretty expensive hobbies.

Dave Foster:

That’s definitely been a defining characteristic expensive hobbies. Our boys are, they’re all grown now adults – 22 and 24. Yeah, Evan’s completely out on his own now my older son and he’s a police officer up in Davison Township, just finished his field training up there. He’s riding solo now. He loves his job. He definitely is in the right profession. He went to Northwood University for almost two years to get into automotive aftermarket because again, car nut, got that from somebody probably me. He really realized during the whole covid lockdown thing when he couldn’t attend college, he was just taking college classes that the light bulb went off in his head and he’d always wanted to get into law enforcement and we’re like, man, no better time than now. So during the whole covid lockdown thing, he did the police academy and just absolutely loves his choices. Then younger brother, he went to Alma was going to play football for Alma and did one semester of that, realized that he had played enough years of football, didn’t feel like getting beat up anymore. As well as the fact, I think he got very intrigued by his brother’s first responder path and one of those like, “Hey, I never even thought about that.”

But he did fire academy first and then got sponsored by a department to go back and do the police academy to become a PSO, a public safety officer, which is like a firefighter police officer combined. In the end, he didn’t really like that gig. He went on to get his EMT was going to do the full firefighter thing, but then most departments require you to be a paramedic and he didn’t want to do that. So I think he’s still trying to figure out what he wants to do, but he’s doing the police thing part-time now and he’s getting his degree in biology. I think he wants to become a forensic investigator, but I think the jury’s kind of out on him where exactly he’s going to land in the end.

Sam Hoff:

So anyway, Dave, I know you’re big into cars and you and the boys buy old cars and fix them up, and then you also have a race team. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about that?

Dave Foster:

We’ve always had, actually before we had kids, I kind of bought some cars that I had wanted. So we have a 1988 RX-7 convertible that I actually converted into a turbo. They sold turbos in Japan, but they never imported in the US as a convertible, so it’s kind of one of my first projects. And then we also bought a 1909 300ZX because I always thought those were such cool cars and came across one. This is back in the day before Facebook Marketplace and all that. That was all Autotrader magazine or whatever. So I acquired cars before we acquired kids, and then from there we had bought many boats over the years. We were big into Great Lakes boating. We kept a boat on Lake St. Clair for many years. We’d boat down the Cedar Point down the museum parks, down the to Put-in-Bay and Kelly’s Island, all the ones in Lake Erie and Lake Huron.

And then as the boys got older, we started acquiring more. We have quite a collection, like older stuff. And then was it 2011? We found Quarter Midgets, which is a type of circle track racing for kids. They look like carts, but they’re very specific to always turning left. So both boys, they started in 2011 with quarter midget racing, which quarter midget racing has been around since the late 1940s, early 1950s. It’s pretty cool thing if you do some research on it. Many famous racers all the way back to Jeff Gordon started his career in a quarter midget out in California. So we did that for five, six years, traveled the country. It was so much fun because it’s just kids racing. It’s pretty low pressure and a lot of family camaraderie. But then of course the boys get older, they age out of it, and we still enjoyed racing.

So we decided to spend even more money and went into big car racing. Got into, we’re currently in open wheel, modified racing, interesting hybrid. It’s kind of like a late model stock car kind of thing, NASCAR type thing, but open wheel. It started back in the 1950s with the idea of a stock car and you just rip off the fenders and you rip off certain parts and it’s “modified.” The current version, of course is all very specialized, but that was its origin. And also like 700 horsepower, 2,400 pounds and really tight racing.

Hopefully the car gets in the trailer in one piece when it’s done. It’s short track, it’s a lot of fun. I mean, it’s one of those things where you always end up with a true love-hate relationship. Nothing has a swing of emotions and rushes of adrenaline like a racing. I mean, being in a racetrack and participating in that, I mean, it’s just incredible. The range of emotions and the level of adrenaline and the things that happen throughout the race day are just like nothing you experienced anywhere else. I guess that makes it kind of addicting. That’s why we keep going back. Certainly not cheap.

Sam Hoff:

Yeah. Talking about Patti Engineering, when you first joined our team in ’95, there were pretty much four of us in the office, and I know the other three of us were traveling a lot. So there you are as a recent college grad, going to an empty office and pretty much unlocking and locking the door and working on projects.

Dave Foster:

Oh yeah. I mean it was pretty intriguing when I put it in context of what our new hire process is today. Shortly after you guys hired me, I think you were in Janesville doing a GM project, if I remember right. And the other two guys are on site and yeah, you show up in the morning and unlock the door, turn on the lights and work by yourself all day as an employee of all of 30 days or 60 days or something. In trial by fire. I mean there was no send you an email or anything back then either. There was a landline phone, I think we had pagers. So you were truly isolated. There wasn’t a whole lot of support you could count on right then, right in the middle of that. Well, it was only going a few months in when you guys had your first baby, when you had Payton. So there was some distractions around that too. So that was, you brought in an outside guy to come kind of be my mentor while you guys were starting your family. It was just a crazy time.

Sam Hoff:

Yep. When Payton was born July 3rd, 1995, she had an extra long stay in the hospital. There were some complications. She’s fine today, let me tell you, she’s more than fine. She’s definitely in control of her life as a 29-year-old and an engineer and an attorney. So we’re quite proud of her. But I remember I had to check off the grid, called a buddy of mine, Craig Egan, who had a really small company himself, and he came in, kind of helped us with some projects. We had some projects to finish, and I remember when I was back at work, he called me and goes, “Sam, you got to hold on to Dave Foster. That guy is really, really sharp. You got to hold on to him.”

Dave Foster:

I guess that worked.

Sam Hoff:

It worked, it worked.

Dave Foster:

And it’s been anything but a smooth ride, running your own small businesses is kind of like the racing thing. Definitely a love hate relationship, isn’t it?

Sam Hoff:

There are high highs and low lows, and I know you probably feel the same way, but man, the last thing you can do ever in is feel sorry for yourself. You’re going to have projects that go great. You’re going to have projects that are challenges. You get through them, and you learn from your mistakes and go from there. You and I, I think, compliment each other very well because I’m kind of the forward facing and have a lot of good ideas. I’m pretty good at meeting with clients and all that stuff, but I am not a detail guy, and I mean, ask me to try to find a file that I worked on a couple of weeks ago. I can’t find it. So I need somebody who’s good with the details to be my conscience, and you very much fill that in.

Why don’t you talk a little bit about some of the challenges of running a system integrator?

Dave Foster:

Yeah, I think it’s a good point that you make this idea of having complimentary skills. It’s funny because, and you and I have worked together for long enough now. I mean, we know so much about each other. We could write books probably on other, and the idea is that there’s a lot of things that you and I have in common. I mean, certainly we both love cars and there’s just a lot of areas where we see eye to eye in various things, and then there’s so many ways that we’re incredibly different and would choose completely different paths given the same set of choices. And I think that combination has worked well all these years because there’s stuff that you’re energized by that just absolutely just deflates me, like you’re saying, the customer facing part. For me, it’s something that just takes, just saps my energy.

And then for you, when you’re focusing on all the details and all the nuance, it becomes noise. And for me, I want keep digging into it and I want to separate it and isolate it and dig deeper. And you’re like, “yeah, you go ahead. You do that. I’m going to go visit customers.” So it works well. I don’t think we step on each other’s toes very often, and I think you have to start with that, right? I see a lot of companies have a lot of common strengths and a lot of common weaknesses, and that just really exposes you. And I think we’ve done that even with how we’ve hired and all the various facets of our company. We look for complimentary skills, people that can cover weaknesses and not just duality of strength. I think that’s something you have to really focus on in the challenge you’re running, particularly an integrator because there’s so many things we deal with, I mean the technical’s there.

There’s no doubt about it. I mean, you have to be technically sharp, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You also have to be incredibly politically aware. I mean, when you’re on a customer’s floor and in a plant who you say what to and how you act and when you show up and when you leave and how you interact and just what it looks like you’re doing sometimes. I mean, it’s just incredible how that can completely override you technically. Technically, you could be as sharp as anybody, but the perception is that you weren’t because some secondary behavior. So you really need people that are very well-rounded in this industry, and that’s where the strength weaknesses thing is so important. A lot of mentoring, a lot of people that compliment each other. Support. Support is just massive. It’s amazing. I mean, customers expect every single person we send in the field to be an expert at everything, completely unrealistic the way that, and you can just throw up your hands.

But that’s the expectation. And what we’ve done, I think has been very successful with that is just having a really strong support network behind the scenes. So the guy goes on site and he’s got all of his skills, and all of a sudden he hits one of his weaknesses and he takes a quick bathroom break and he picks up the phone and he calls a peer, he calls the director for his office and says, “Hey, this is what I’m seeing.” And again, because of these complimentary skills, “oh hey, here’s what I would do in that situation.” “Oh, I never thought of that.” And then it comes back for his bathroom break and he looks like an expert again. These are the kind of things that I think really separate us and is key to running a business like this.

Sam Hoff:

Yeah, it’s funny. I was having a conversation with Matt Shewell, one of our team members yesterday, and he was kind of talking about the beginning of his career. He graduated from Michigan Tech, was working for FANUC, and he basically had six weeks of experience, and then he was sent to Baltimore on his own as the lead installation engineer, and his boss gave him a great piece of advice. He goes, “Matt, show up on time and make sure they like you”. And he said, “that’s what I did, those were the keys to kind of having the plant have my back a little bit because of my lack of experience. I showed up on time and I made sure they liked me.”

Dave Foster:

I think inevitably, we’re all going to need someone else to give us a little bit of leeway, and so you have to make sure that those people like you, as you say, they like you enough that they’re willing to, “alright, I’ll cut this guy a little bit of slack. He seems to mostly know what he’s doing and he’s heading in the right direction.” And that exact same scenario played out again where you’re maybe a little abrasive aggressive. What happens a lot of times in this industry too is you get people that are cocky. They kind of come in like they know so much when they really don’t, and they don’t get cut that slack and it goes sideways, and it’s just amazing again, that well-roundedness is probably the single most important key, certainly in how we recruit and what we look for, because this is a very challenging job. What we do in the environments we work in and what’s expected of us is awfully awfully high. So it’s difficult to meet those expectations consistently. So you need tools and those are great tools that Matt has, great tools.

Sam Hoff:

Yeah, yeah. It’s challenging, it’s rewarding too. There’s nothing like going into client and watching your code run a system or being able to help them improve their efficiency, improve their throughput, help them make money, and we have a lot of clients that we’ve made them look good in their organizations by helping their efficiency and helping them look good in their manager’s eyes.

Dave Foster:

Oh, there’s no doubt that I think, the two pieces you said there, I think the self-satisfaction in seeing your work is, I mean, it’s as important I think as the pay, right? I mean, you really want to know that you’re making a difference and that something that you put so much of yourself into is going to live on and it’s going to produce more. And I think that is a good segue into this idea of where OEE sits and all that, this idea that you could continue to sharpen that knife and it could continue to get better. That’s an area I think that we’ve really started to acknowledge more, and I think our employees really acknowledge more is this idea that there’s always something better. We can do the old settled science argument, it sort of flies in the face of that, right? I mean, you can look at a machine and say, that’s as good as it’s ever going to be. And it’s like no, no, there’s always more that we can do. You certainly hit a point of diminishing returns, but I think there’s so much more that could be accomplished without ripping everything out and starting over. And when you accomplish that, when you can see that, when you can find those little golden nuggets buried in the sand and pull them out, I mean, that’s quite a level of self-satisfaction too. So there’s a little bit of a selfishness in it, right? But it’s a win-win.

Sam Hoff:

Yeah. Those small things like that, I mean, if you look at racing, that’s the difference between a fifth place car and a car that’s winning the race, right? Just those little things.

Dave Foster:

Oh, absolutely. That’s the stuff that we talked about many times in the past is that a race car is a great analogy to a manufacturing machine is that there’s so many parameters on that thing that you can tweak. There’s so many things on a race car, whether it’s tire pressure, whether it’s shock settings, whether it’s ride heights and shock travels, weight adjustments. Did we put enough fuel in? How much fuel did we put in? Did we put too much fuel in? There are other weight penalties around that. There’s so many dials that you could turn, and they all have different levels of benefit, and you have limited amounts of time that you have available to you. All these things are true in the real world, in the manufacturing environment. I mean like, “hey, I’ve shut the line down to make improvements.” They’re not going to give it to me all day, so I better hit on the stuff that’s important.

When you’re in the pits between practice sessions and you’re trying to make the car faster, what are you going to tweak on? First you need to know, is tire pressure the most important thing for me to focus on right now, or is it something else? And I think the OEE argument’s the same thing. Sure there are improvements that can always be made, but are they worth it? Are they worth the time and investment? If they’re not, the customer’s going to say, “man, you just cost me all this downtime to make these adjustments. It’s really not any better than it was.” So you really have to be smart about the improvements that you make too and the things that you’re adjusting. So it’s some great analogies to racing and just like in racing, it’s a pressure situation. You need to be able to handle that because lots being expected of you.

Sam Hoff:

Yeah, for sure. Looking back on your time at Patti Engineering, why don’t you discuss your least favorite project, leave the customer name out of it, but the project that made you shake your head the most?

Dave Foster:

Oh man, that’s a tough question. With 30 years, there’s quite a few that are examples of that. I think for me, I almost need to categorize rather than select a single one. And the ones always bothered me the most, I think are customers that are just unfair. I understand the challenges. I mean, this is an incredibly challenging environment to work in – manufacturing. People that haven’t worked in it just don’t understand it. I mean, it is a pressure cooker. Whatever you think the expectations are, they’re higher. And it’s honestly only gotten worse over time. I mean, I think there are fewer people who are willing and able to do it, which just takes the people who are left and asks even more of them. So I understand all of the pressures that everyone’s working under, and man, we get it and we want to help. We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, but all too often, maybe they’re looking for a scapegoat, they’re just venting.

It’s hard to know exactly, but there are customers that are just unfair and they’re expecting something that is either unrealistic, that they’re clearly not paying for. And that’s the thing that just bothers me to no end. When you’re working with a customer and they just aren’t willing to be fair, it’s like, look, we’re both taking it here. We’re both working hard. Just how can we find a solution to this? And if the solution always has to be, I win, you lose, that’s one that I wish would go away, but I suppose there’s human nature in it.

Sam Hoff:

Yeah, and we’ve always said that we do not mind difficult customers at all. In fact, we like difficult customers, but we certainly never want to work with customers that are unfair. And there are some customers you’re just better giving to your competition.

Dave Foster:

Absolutely. I think difficult customers usually are product of challenging situations, and we like challenges. There are people in our industry that do cookie cutter stuff. They just keep putting out the same product over and over again with a couple of tweaks and enhancements. I think that would be horrible for us. I mean, every job is like, “whoa, this is like nothing we’ve ever done before,” and we can apply everything that we know to it, but it still is challenging and it’s difficult, and we enjoy that and we understand that a lot of times those make difficult customers because they have all the same challenges. I think it really helps our tenure for employees too, because our environment is so gratifying, because obviously the larger the challenge, the more gratifying it is when you come up with a solution. I think that’s a big part of why we’ve got a lot of people here that have been here, 10, 15, 20, in my case, 30 years. I mean, it’s not uncommon to bump into a lot of those people like that here at Patti.

Sam Hoff:

So what has been your favorite project through the years?

Dave Foster:

Whole project? I mean, first off, there’s either me doing a project or me managing a project or me being a very distant involved in a project as a VP. So that’s changed a lot over the years. I mean, back in the early days, I really did enjoy the paint shops. I really liked, when I first started with Patti, we were all FANUC robotics paint shops. I swear it was like 90% of what we did and spent a lot of time down there in Shreveport, Louisiana, which that plant’s no longer functioning, but for some reason, paint shops, the creativity in it for me was so much fun. You just see every vehicle comes in boring, powdered gray and leaves any number of different colors, and it was just, that felt so creative to me. There was a lot of science in it. I mean, there was fan air and atom air and paint pressures and electrostatic settings, and that was the science. But in the end, it created art, and I always just thought that was neat when I was an engineer doing that. I enjoyed that, did not enjoy my shoes always sticking to the floor everywhere I walked with the wet paint, but enjoyed the paint projects.

Sam Hoff:

Paint shop purple. Anybody who’s worked in the paint shop knows exactly what we’re talking about.

Dave Foster:

Yeah, those little broken pieces too, and you’d look at all the layers in there. That was always fun, I always just to keep souvenirs.

Sam Hoff:

Any closing thoughts, Dave?

Dave Foster:

One thing these last 30 years has really taught me is that you really don’t know what the future holds. And that’s not a problem, right. I mean, that shouldn’t be scary. That shouldn’t be something that you’re fighting against. I’ve been absolutely amazed how my life has turned out and almost never conformed to any idea I had in my head of how it was going to turn out. Started as a kid in Michigan, ended up in Grand Cayman, ended up going to school in Flint, and then working here in southeast Michigan with Patti for 30 years. I mean, nowhere along the way could I have ever predicted any of this. My boys both ended up becoming first responders. No one in our family has anything to do with that industry, and yet there they are and loving it and enjoying it. So I think the idea of having this plan and executing to that plan and then having a lot of stress in your life because things don’t follow the plan is absolutely wrong. Have a rough plan and roll with it because things turn out the way they’re supposed to. So that’s probably my closing point.

Sam Hoff:

Very well said. All right, well, thank you for the last 30 years. I’ve enjoyed the ride, and we got a little bit of future yet ahead of us. Thanks a lot, Dave. I appreciate your time today and let’s end our careers on a positive note here in the next 10 years or so.

Dave Foster:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thanks. This is my first ever podcast.

Sam Hoff:

There you go. All right, man. Have a great day.

Dave Foster:

You too.