St. Charles, IL: Honeywell

Tuesday, January 15th

We woke up early and drove out to St. Charles, IL to visit Honeywell’s facility there, though the signs all read Sensor Systems. Honeywell manufactures fire alarms, fire alarm modules, and sprinkler system flow controls. We sat through a brief introduction to Honeywell and the St. Charles facility and then we were all taken out for a tour of the facility. Then during lunch, we were able to enter a smoke room to see how disorienting a smoke filled room is while trying to find the exits. Let me assure you, it is amazingly difficult. My public service announcement for the trip would be to definitely identify any and all emergency exits upon entering your hotel as some of these buildings get very intricate with twisting hallways and many, many doors. After lunch, we were left on our own to tour the floor and discover areas in which the facility could improve their operations. With 50 some eyes out on the floor we were able to come up with about 3 pages worth of suggestions that the plant manager was eager to hear about. I thought that the plant manager of this facility gave a refreshing light to the idea of off-shoring your work. He was a definite advocate for looking at and evaluating off-shoring at the total cost level and he also sought to keep his more manual labor (that is also more flexible) instead of moving to more of an automated facility. A very refreshing viewpoint that I believe needs to be adopted by many other American companies.

After our tour finished, Honeywell took us out to Giordano’s Pizzeria, a Chicago traditional deep dish establishment. They make their pizzas upside-down, but they are still very tasty. I’d definitely suggest checking them out while in town! Once dinner was over, we headed back to our hotel for the night. This was about the point in the tour that roughly 50% of the class was sick so we’d head to the pharmacy in groups buying up all the cold & flu medicines that they had. I guess that is part of the problem with intense traveling and a tight-knit group like we have had over the past nine days!