Tait Staff Spotlight - Dean Mischewski

At Tait, we take great pride in serving the organizations that keep communities safe, our lights on, and the modern world flowing. To provide them with the great support Tait is renowned for, we have a dedicated team of individuals worldwide who work hard to deliver results. In this blog, we meet Dean Mischewski, Manufacturing Engineering Manager at Tait.

"I did an engineering degree at Massey University, majoring in Manufacturing and Industrial Technology, and was recruited by Tait as a new graduate in 1995. I started in the factory on the T3000 line as a Manufacturing Systems Engineer. The T3000 was our early high-volume hand-portable radio. Since then I’ve had roles in Production Planning, Design for Manufacture, Quality Systems, and Production Engineering, and now I am Manufacturing Engineering Manager."

Today we got the opportunity to ask Dean a few questions so you can get to know him!

Q1: What were the steps, both accidental and deliberate, that lead you to where you are in your career?

I had an inspirational science teacher at school who encouraged me to explore engineering as a field of study and future career. Massey University in Palmerston North offered a degree focused on manufacturing which promised an interesting future career, and my girlfriend at the time – now my wife – was planning to study Veterinary Science which could only be done at Massey, so that solidified my decision. Then she changed her mind at the last minute and became an apprentice jockey. I stuck with engineering, and everything worked out in the long run.

My whole career since I graduated has been at Tait. Many of the key steps have been deliberate actions, but mostly not by me. I’ve been fortunate to have had good leaders who wanted to develop their people and who provided opportunities for this. I just had to say “Yes” to the opportunities as they were offered. Sometimes this took me outside my comfort zone, but I’ve always had the support I’ve needed from managers and colleagues, and this fostering of people’s personal growth has been a great feature of my experience at Tait.

Q2: Biggest lesson you learned from your youth, biggest lesson you learned as an adult?

Here’s a couple of lessons that stand out for me…
 From my youth: God loves me – not for anything special about me, but just because he’s Good.

 As an adult: “every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before” – this is from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, where he talks about the relationship between our decisions and our character and our destiny. It’s a bit like the second of Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” – “begin with the end in mind” – which has helped me think about my own personal mission. Who do I want to be? How are my present actions and choices shaping me?

Q3: What is your favorite hobby to do outside of work? What hobby/interest would you also like to pursue but haven’t had the opportunity to yet?

I like sports and physical activity such as weightlifting, basic gymnastics, canoe polo, basketball, and historical European martial arts (i.e. sword fighting). I love being active with my kids, like working out together or playing basketball together.

As for things I’d like to focus on in the future – I’d like to have a bit more self-sufficiency by gaining skills in things like gardening, looking after livestock, and getting better with practical home-handyman stuff.

I also like to read. Sometimes when things get hectic, I think that a dream job might be working in a well-stocked second-hand bookstore that hardly anyone ever visits.

Q4: What’s a subject you could give a 30 minute presentation on with no prior preparation?

“The Problem of Evil.” It’s a significant issue in philosophy of religion to do with how to reconcile the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God with the existence of evil and suffering in the world, and it was the subject of my thesis when I did my Master’s degree in theology.

Q5: What important figure throughout all of history would you like to have a conversion with given the opportunity?

That’s easy - Jesus of Nazareth. If he was busy because of all the other people wanting to talk to him, then maybe St Francis de Sales instead. St Francis was the bishop of Geneva in the late 16th and early 17th century, a hero of mine and a great example of someone mission-focused, tough, smart, articulate, but also humble, patient, gentle, and very kind-hearted. He was described as a “rare bird, this Monsieur de Genève, he is devout and also learned; and not only devout and learned but at the same time a gentleman. A very rare combination.” I feel like I could learn a lot from him.

Q6: What gets you out of bed in the morning? Perhaps pets, kids, hobbies, anything other than work

My family: my wife, Julie, and our nine children, aged 6 to 25 (and, just in the last few weeks, a couple of grandkids born within a few days of each other to two of my children). The “getting me out of bed in the morning” was exactly the case when we had lots of little kids. Sometimes when we had a new baby, I would try to help Julie guard her own precious sleep by putting a mattress in the hallway outside our bedroom door and sleeping on it myself, so that the other kids couldn’t disturb her without literally walking over me first.

My primary vocation is husband and father, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that my family is provided for and that my kids have the formation and opportunities they need to grow up into men and women of character. 

Q7: How would you explain what it’s like working in Tait’s engineering/manufacturing department?

My team is in a cool position, sitting, both figuratively and literally, between the people who do the physical electrical and mechanical design of our products, and the factory that makes the products. Our job is to make sure that what we design can be built – i.e. we need to respect the laws of physics and the limits of electronics assembly technology, and make sure we keep up with that technology as it develops. And we do have an amazing high-tech factory; as far as I know we have the largest dedicated, highly-automated, electronics assembly facility in the country, and there’s probably only one or two of comparable size and capability in Australia. My team is full of talented people who keep our machines and processes functioning and improving, and they are all great to work with. I feel really lucky to have the job that I do.

Q8: How would you explain what ‘lean manufacturing’ is to someone with no knowledge of engineering or manufacturing process?

Lean manufacturing is a way of creating value for a customer with effective, minimal use of resources, emphasising continuous improvement of a manufacturing system through identifying and removing waste. It does this by respecting the people who work closely with the process...

Lean manufacturing is sometimes visualised as a house. The foundation of the house is stability, through “standardised work” – identifying and locking in best practices while remaining open to further improvement (“kaizen”), and through smoothing the flow of work so the system can run at a steady, sustainable pace (“heijunka”). The house has two pillars. The first is “just-in-time” processes where work is pulled through the system in small manageable chunks only as it is needed, with minimal inventory sitting around unused. The second pillar is “jidoka,” or “automation with a human touch,” where we do what we can to make sure it is easy to do a process correctly, and hard to do it wrong – but if it does go wrong, there’s a cultural expectation that we’ll stop and sort it out in a way that is both effective and respectful of everyone involved. The roof of the house is what everything else supports: continuous improvement in safety, quality, productivity, lead time, human engagement, and cost.

If there’s anything Dean or the teams at our regional offices can do to assist you, please don’t hesitate to contact our team!

Read more Tait Staff Spotlights.