Episode 51: An Interview With Derek DeGeest, DeGeest Corp. and Lesta USA

In October 2024, Products Finishing attended FABTECH in Orlando, Florida. The event’s Finishing pavilion always offers a great opportunity to get insights into the latest innovations for coaters and finishers, and PF got the chance to catch up with Derek DeGeest, president of DeGeest Corp. and Lesta USA (Tea, South Dakota) to hear about the company’s latest developments.

The company held a ribbon cutting at FABTECH to announce its partnership with Eurosider (Toscana, Italy), provider of Nitrotherm and Polifluid technologies, which use nitrogen as a carrier instead of compressed air to deliver a more consistent finish to liquid and powder finishing applications, respectively. The solutions eliminate variables such as temperature and humidity in the finishing process and deliver up to 30% on system savings. According to DeGeest, the solution addresses an important step for manual finishing operations looking to introduce more automation. I sat down with DeGeest to discuss trends in finishing automation and the challenges he hopes to address with Eurosider’s solutions.

PF: For years, we’ve been talking about automation within the finishing industry. For a long time, the real problem was having a high mix of parts and smaller production runs — and that was a stumbling block for the automation of finishing operations. It feels like things are starting to change a little bit. There are different solutions that make it possible to do more varied parts and smaller programs. Talk a little bit about what you’re trying to do in this space, and how this is forwarding some of the possibilities for finishers.

DD: Self-learning robotic technology has already been around a long time. We’ve already been rapidly programming automation. There are a lot of different ways that we’re creating programs that can paint — that can create and deliver product to a part. But there’s so much more that has to be accomplished. Most solutions are just creating a path that’s just getting a program that can repeat — and the problem is the robot repeats, but there are so many variables in the finishing process that aren’t being controlled.

That is the thing that we’re helping educate the market on from our lived experience. Rather than simply creating a solution that can generate a painting program, we’re working to address all the variables and create solutions to make a scalable process.

PF: Trends in automation often overlap with trends within other areas of manufacturing including workforce, succession planning and industry education. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing in that arena? What do these tools that are now available really mean for the next generation of finishers and manufacturers?

DD: As a whole, the manufacturing industry has a responsibility to do everything we can to try to help attract people to this industry. We’re all competing for a resource and we have to use the tools and technologies that are available today — there is an expectation that they are going to have these tools available. The next generation wants to work at places that have integrated solutions, technology and automation. People want to know that there’s a future in the work and the things that they’re doing. They see the investments. They see that there’s growth potential that can continue to scale, and they can be a part of that. They can get excited about it. That’s something people want to buy into.

From there, all the really cool things about finishing can become interesting — the different mixes, chemicals and pretreatments — all of the things I think are fascinating. As soon as they can see the career potential, then the rest of the world of finishing is there for them to be able to better grow into.

PF: What do you think manual finishers need to keep in mind as they work to implement more automation in their process?

DD: Most people are starting in the wrong spot. They see the robots and think, “I don’t have enough people, or I need to be able to produce more.”

What we’re seeing is that when people want to move to more automation, they haven’t addressed or looked at any of the other processes or variables that they currently have that would affect what that would do, because it’s always been done manually before. Almost every place I go has a couple people that have immense knowledge of their process, of their application, of all the nuances of what they do — and if that person’s not there, things go to hell.

If you move to automation before addressing the issue of relying on the tribal knowledge of those key people to overcome the variables, that automation is not going to be able to be successful — those big investments won’t produce the returns that they’re supposed to.

That is really the biggest problem that we see, and that’s why we’ve partnered with Eurosider. The first step is to eliminate variables in your manual application. Instead of starting at “how do I move everything to automation?” you eliminate variables on the liquid and on the powder side. You take the temperature and the humidity out of the equation. Once those things are controlled, it makes your manual equipment work more efficiently and makes it easier for your operators to achieve first pass transfer efficiency — and allows you to be able to save on your coating [material costs] and optimize your process. Once that’s easier to do manually, then you can create a plan and move into more automation.