Managers' Roundtable

Q: What was the highlight of your year with your team?

Vimlendra: 2024 has been an exceptional year, with our Marhowra site meeting and even exceeding all quality performance metrics. One key highlight is an impressive improvement in Infancy FLY, which stands within 1.0 (~0.8) for the year — which is a world-class rating.

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This year’s success is a testament to the way we Expand the Possible through a drive for continuous improvement. We have explored opportunities within our plant, along with supplier shops, to improve across the value chain. Quality is a journey, and we have celebrated every single milestone with our teams to keep them engaged and encouraged. I would like to thank everyone for their hard work in making this a successful year!

Martin: This was a new role for me this year, and we had 11 different people on our team in new roles, which of course brought challenges with everybody taking on new tasks. But we had great support for each other, and we were able to run without major issues. For example, one of our people was a master scheduler for the first time, and that’s a very analytical position. She worked hard to contact our customers and recover our back orders, so now we’ve reached our best year in terms of on-time delivery. And we had lots of other great achievements for other roles as well.

Brady: As part of RELCO’s integration into Wabtec, we’ve had some strict requirements with a lot of our processes, especially physical inventory. Physical inventory became a quarterly process, instead of a yearly one, for our site the last few years. We were held to a strict cycle count through compliance to follow these rules because we weren’t meeting our accuracy targets. I’m happy to announce that this year we achieved our accuracy goals and are able to move on from the strict financial compliance standards, so we will get to follow our own cycle counts for next year, which is a very exciting achievement!

Q: What were some of the things you were most proud of as a leader?

Vimlendra: There were three key areas that I focused on and we instilled as a team that I’m proud of: enhanced quality awareness, a customer-first mindset, and future readiness. We improved quality through a cultural emphasis, dedicated quality workshops, quality alerts, and stand-downs. We became more customer first by focusing on quality and field performance, and it’s been rewarding to see customer-centricity, promptness, proactiveness, and responsiveness taking root across our teams, further strengthening our relationship with our customers. As far as future readiness, we’ve been working to expand the consistency and reliability we’ve demonstrated for a single customer up to this point to a new customer in Simandou.

Martin: This role has been a big step for me because it’s connecting all the supply chain dots, from the internal teams to the customers to the suppliers. You need to bring in the material on time, and deliver the orders on time. You need to comply with the importing regulations and the exporting material requirements. So it’s been challenging managing the team with all the different responsibilities, but we’ve reached good metrics and our customers are happy, so that’s been a huge achievement this year.

Brady: As part of RELCO’s integration into Wabtec, we’ve had some strict requirements with a lot of our processes, especially phWhen I joined the facility here, the site was on the Operational Excellence journey but had become one of the lagging facilities. The site was a year and a half into the OpEx journey, which is supposed to take a year, with no end in sight. That meant we had strict expectations and daily meetings to help us get on the right track.

Thankfully, in July of this year, we graduated from the program and we’re finally able to move forward as a site. This is a huge milestone, and now we’re able to control our own path.

Q: What are you looking forward to most with Wabtec in 2025?

Vimlendra: The coming year promises both challenges and opportunities. We’re poised well on our journey with the new export order. And we’re preparing ourselves by training and qualifying our new workforce on the special processes like torquing, welding, painting, crimping and cable routing, conducting PFMEA workshops, assessing risks, and implementing quality assurance plans to ensure built-in quality from the start. I am excited about the journey ahead and the ways we can achieve our goals and set new benchmarks for quality and customer satisfaction as One Wabtec.

Martin: We keep winning orders with locomotive and mining customers, and I’m really proud of how Wabtec has incrementally improved its potential, not just economically, but for all the people who work here. We’re winning more experience and forming new leaders. I’m expecting this same strategy, so we can keep learning and growing, in the coming year. I’m really thankful for all of my teammates and the people around the Monterrey shop because everybody is working hard to achieve these goals.

Brady: Now that we’ve built this great foundation with the Operational Excellence program, I’m excited to get together with my team to look ahead, because we can forge ahead to our own destination now. It’s time for us to become a stronger part of Wabtec, to be more integrated into the systems, and actually be part of One Wabtec. We’re excited to follow the same rules, use the same data, have the same SOPs, and operate at the same standard of excellence as the other sites. Thanks to my team members, and thanks to everyone who came from Fort Worth to help us reach this level.

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