IndustrialSage Transcript Danny: Well good morning, and welcome to another episode of IndustrialSage. This is the Executive Series and today, I have a very special guest. I have Ed Brown, who is the President of Topper Industrial. Ed, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of IndustrialSage. Ed: Good morning, Danny, thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to this. Danny: I'm looking forward to it as well. We were just chatting before we started, you're saying it's a very warm and balmy 20-ish degrees in Milwaukee. Is that right? Ed: It is, and we got a little snow, but I know I'm jealous, we wish we were somewhere where it was warmer, but it's a good place to live. Danny: The Midwest is great, I love it up there, especially, there's a lot of great winter sports and the summers are just absolutely beautiful up there. So for those who aren't familiar with Topper, real quick, if you could just give me a quick, little synopsis of Topper Industrial, who you guys are, what you do and then we'll dive into a little bit more about you. Ed: Oh, no problem at all. As you mentioned, Topper Industrial is located in Sturtevant, Wisconsin. We're about 15 miles south of Milwaukee. We've been in this location since we started the company in 1994. We started out, my background, I'm an engineer. Went to The University of Wisconsin, which I'm very proud of. We started out, as a young guy, I was really involved in welding and metal fabricating. So, I started a business that, we primarily built material handling racks. And what I mean by that, we would be welding up racks for Harley-Davidson, to ship engines from their assembly plant in Milwaukee to New York, Pennsylvania. We would build engine racks. It's a structural, steel device that you would put a finished product on. Normally pretty durable and we would then ship that to various customers. Chrysler, in their earlier days, became a very big customer. They had a plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which has long been closed, but it was a huge stepping stone in that Chrysler had become a major customer for us and they have been ever since and they still are. There's some things about, that later on, we can brag about, maybe in a little bit if we have time. But, an interesting thing happened in 1999. I got a call from a Chrysler plant indicating they wanted to switch from fork truck delivery system to a cart delivery system. First time I've heard of it. When I got the call, I thought it was odd, I'd never heard of such a thing. But it was the first time I heard the term lean, which of course I've learned to embrace and I'm a big supporter of lean. We did do that project, Danny. It isn't quite the system we have today, but in the process, it launched what Topper Industrial is today. We primarily today, design and build material handling delivery carts. In most cases, the delivery system consists of a tugger. We're just starting to break into AGVs, we've done a few of those programs, where the carts make the delivery, but instead of a fork truck delivering one pallet of parts to replace parts in an assembly line; we now will pull five, six, seven carts. And in the process, they pick up empties. The primary, most common system is, a cart is filled with some parts, can be a motorcycle assembly line, could be a car assembly line, could be anything, or even a workstation. Well, we deliver the parts to the workstation in a cart, the operator works out of that cart. When the cart is empty, we replenish it with a new cart. When you are looking at cart delivery, which is what it is today, it's called fork truck free now. Cart delivery's kind of lost, it's been lost and the term now is fork truck free. And that's not actually, truly accurate, but the reason is,