Look beneath the innovative paint and clear film solutions from our PPG Advanced Surface Technologies (AST) joint venture, and you’ll see a solid foundation of operational excellence and quality management built by Tracy Forrester, the business’ global quality director, and his multinational team of experts.
Quality = Balancing Stakeholder Satisfaction
Tracy’s introduction to quality was not in college but at an Indiana foundry that he joined as an hourly worker after graduating from high school. That experience instilled in him a deep respect for people on the front lines as well as a desire to learn about different tools and methodologies to improve the manufacturing process. College was his next destination, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration followed by a master’s degree in leadership, strategic foresight and entrepreneurship.
Over the past three decades, Tracy has held quality and continuous improvement roles in the telecom and automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) sectors. He joined PPG AST when the joint venture with entrotech, Inc., was formed in 2023, serving on the leadership team. The business is developing multi-layer films that stick to an automotive or industrial part’s surface to bring color, decorations and protection in place of paint.
My major responsibility is figuring out how to balance the satisfaction of our three most relevant stakeholders – employees, customers, and shareholders – by establishing, maintaining and improving our quality standards. If we don’t have these standards, it’s really hard to communicate our expectations, ensure we’re moving in the right direction and have a baseline against which we can measure improvement.
Certifications with Purpose
That’s why one of Tracy’s first focus areas was building a robust quality management system for PPG AST. Such a system includes specifications, procedures and processes and ideally goes beyond manufacturing and into support processes like information technology, accounts payable and inventory. This enters the realm of operational excellence, which starts with a vision and moves through developing a strategy, creating processes, and maintaining and improving them to get the desired result. Quality management is one aspect of operational excellence.
In 2024, the PPG AST quality management system that Tracy and his team created led to ISO-9001 certification at PPG AST’s New Albany, Ohio, and Korntal-Munchingen, Germany, locations. Both locations are expected to receive IATF-1649 certification, which is one of the most widely used international standards for quality management in the automotive industry, in 2025. Certifications not only standardize and improve processes but also provide credibility with customers.
“We committed to our customers that we would achieve these certifications, but we made a conscious decision to not put a quality management system in place simply to get them. Instead, we saw this as an opportunity to strengthen the long-term impact on all three stakeholder groups. This increased the complexity and difficulty compared to just trying to meet an auditor’s checklist, but it also made the final quality management system much more useful.”
A good example of this usefulness is formal and visual work instructions that now ensure all PPG AST employees are following the same manufacturing processes. This hits the sweet spot for each stakeholder group. Customers get the zero-defect products they require, employees have a clear understanding of expectations, and shareholders appreciate the cost savings from lower rejection rates and decreased throughput.
We’re also using quality techniques to help the joint venture expand its product offerings and break into new markets. This includes developing a process that will determine what offerings are and aren’t feasible to pursue based on our current bandwidth. Sorting through the noise in a formal way has been extremely helpful as we determine where to focus our resources right now.
A Path of Personal Continuous Improvement
While continuous improvement is important in quality management, it’s also been a hallmark of Tracy’s own development. He’s a big proponent of being open to new ideas, skills and tools, believing that everything begins to look like a nail if your toolbox consists only of a hammer. A desire to help people expand their toolboxes led him to write two books: “Problem Fixing, Problem Solving” and “The Building Blocks of Operational Excellence”.
“After working in quality for quite some time, it became clear to me that people were solving the same problems over and over again. That’s what led me to write the first book. My second book on operational excellence resulted from seeing initiatives fail repeatedly because they weren’t supported from the top down and didn’t align with the company’s vision and strategy. Everyone was working in silos.”
Breaking down walls by painting them led Tracy to volunteer for a COLORFUL COMMUNITIES® project at the Ohio School for the Deaf. He worked alongside fellow employee volunteers to transform the school’s library and entrance hallways through paint.
“When you’re involved with one of these projects, you get to collaborate with people from senior leadership to your peers to coworkers you’ve never met. You get to know them in a way you wouldn’t get in the work environment, and you also see how diverse our organization is in terms of background, experiences, perspectives and more. This diversity, along with PPG AST being at the forefront of film innovations, is what makes me #PPGProud.”