On the Line

On this episode of On the Line, our podcast for coaters, finishers and shop owners, PF senior editor Brian Budzynski talks with John Deere manager of enterprise facilities services Rex Krohn Jr.

Rex's tenure with Deere stretches back to 2000, when he joined the ag OEM multinational as a paint engineer. His quarter-century of experience with ag-specific coatings has ranged from operations to engineering to assembly management and global paint oversight. He is a graduate of both the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Iowa State University, where he earned his master's in systems engineering.

This conversation covers coatings for agricultural equipment and the harsh environments they must withstand, John Deere's coatings standards and relationship with its third-party vendors and suppliers, and more.

In this installment of On the Line, Products Finishing (PF) looks at industrial parts cleaning with Dr. Michael Flämmich, general manager of VACOM Montana (Lewistown, Montana) and president of FiT, the German Parts Cleaning Association (Fachverband industrielle Teilereinigung, Neuffen). Fresh off his presentation at this year's Parts Cleaning Conference in Columbus, Ohio, Flämmich talks about what drew him to high-purity cleaning, the forces reshaping the industry and FiT's plans to open its expert network to U.S. participants.

On the latest episode of On the Line, Products Finishing's podcast for coaters and finishers, senior editor Brian Budzynski speaks with Robert Lovegrove, the newly appointed CEO of the ChemQuest Group. Lovegrove joins ChemQuest as only its third CEO in the company's 50-year history after a 13-year tenure at Milliken & Company, where he spent the last decade as Vice President of Corporate Strategy/Corporate Development, working with senior leadership on portfolio transformation and value creation – and overseeing several of Milliken's largest acquisitions. We talk to Robb about his career and new appointment at ChemQuest, as well as what he sees as the key trends and innovations in the industry.

In the latest installment of Products Finishing's (PF) On the Line, we caught up with Connor Callais, product manager at Hubbard-Hall (Waterbury, Connecticut), to talk about the fundamentals that finishers most often get wrong in parts cleaning and pretreatment, best practices for bath chemistry maintenance and regulatory trends shaping the industry. Callais, a member of PF's 40 Under 40 Class of 2023 and a regular contributor to the PF's Ask the Expert column, draws on his years as a technical application specialist working hands-on with customer lines to explain where finishing operations tend to go wrong — and how closer monitoring and earlier conversations with suppliers can prevent it.

When Products Finishing profiled Graymatter Robotics in 2024, the company was an early-stage venture founded by three USC researchers targeting a problem that traditional automation had largely ignored — high-mix, high-variability surface finishing. In this installment of On the Line, PF catches up with Rand Owens, GrayMatter's head of marketing and go-to-market, to get an update on the company's growth, its expanding customer base, and the increasingly sophisticated AI at the center of its work.

In this installment of Products Finishing's (PF) On the Line, PF editor-in-chief Scott Francis catches up with Remington Schieffer, vice president of American CRS Equipment, revisiting a conversation the two began in a previous episode. Schieffer discusses the latest technology and trends in the rectifier space, the evolving landscape of safety compliance and his passion for education initiatives that are helping metal finishers across the country keep their lines — and their workers — safer.

Kevin Biller has been a leader in the powder coating industry for nearly five decades as director of ChemQuest Powder Coating Research (Columbus, Ohio), the author of the "Ask Joe Powder" advice column and host of its corresponding podcast and a technical editor with Powder Coated Tough, among other numerous roles throughout his career. Last year, the Powder Coating Institute inducted Biller into its Hall of Fame. We recently caught up with him to hear about his experiences and his insights into where the industry is headed.

Products Finishing recently surpassed the milestone of our 65th installment of our On the Line podcast. It seems like as good a time as any to take a moment to look back on the podcast, which launched in January 2021 and celebrate 5 years of interviews from finishing industry professionals.

In this episode, we share a couple of excerpts from an older episode and one more recent touching on important trends in the finishing industry.

In this latest installment of On the Line, Products Finishing revisits the perennial topic of workforce trends. With so much evolution in the ways we work, from new automation technologies to rapid improvements in AI and machine learning, the opportunities, as well as the challenges for workers are constantly changing. We recently caught up with PF columnist Matthew Kirchner, the president of the industry education consultancy LAB Midwest, and host of the TechEd Podcast to hear his take on workforce trends in manufacturing and industry education.

Industry education events represent key opportunities for attracting and retaining new talent. In the most recent installment of Products Finishing's On the Line, we talk with Sheila LaMothe, vice president of strategic initiatives for the Chemical Coater's Association International (CCAI, Independence, Ky.). In her role, LaMothe has worked to found several industry education initiatives for CCAI, including its Finishing Education Foundation, for which she serves as the executive director, as well as the Women in Finishing Forum, which will take place May 4-6 in Perrysburg, Ohio.