Joseph Arling Email & Phone Number

I am a manufacturing professional with over 20 years of experience in the agricultural vehicle manufacturing business. I have a unique background in that I started as a machinist in a production role and worked my way up into a quality engineering position. While working as a quality engineer, I finished my bachelor's degree at the University of Iowa. During my eight years as a quality engineer, I introduced detailed scrap tracking and analysis to a chrome plating department, statistical process control to machining departments, and authored a step-by-step inspection plan for two header assembly departments. I eliminated a years-old interference issue on a cotton harvesting vehicle by assembling a part of the vehicle in an inspection lab while utilizing regression analysis to pinpoint an errant relaxation of a position tolerance on a critical weldment. Eliminating this problem saved an hour of rework per machine.After a successful stint as a quality engineer, I moved on to a procurement buyer role a few short months before the COVID-19 pandemic began. As global supply chains melted down, I was able to keep my cool, prioritize, and improvise as necessary to prevent any major shutdowns to my factory for the duration of the pandemic. On any given day during the pandemic, I could be tasked with finding raw material for suppliers that couldn't find it, purchasing weldments from alternate suppliers, making alternate paint plans to get around COVID-related shutdowns, or helping suppliers prioritize their production plans when they fell short of labor. This was all on top of typical procurement activities like rectifying invoice problems, managing inventory levels, and tracking critical shortages.My last role as a cost management specialist made use of all of my prior experience, from the shop floor to the buyer desk. I was responsible for estimating cost of new product designs and ensuring that our buyers were selecting competitive and realistic quotes. My years in machining, fabrication, and assembly gave me an innate understanding of the manufacturing processes used by real-world suppliers. That experience and my quality engineering experience allowed me to pick out designs that would be unnecessarily complex, costly, and difficult to manufacture, and my buyer experience helped me spot quotes that were incomplete or too good to be true.These experiences, combined with my track record for learning new skills quickly, provide a solid foundation for wherever my career will take me next.

Listed skills include Lean Manufacturing.