Miniature fluid handling specialist Bio-Chem Fluidics has announced its new Vice President of Operations, Joe Turiello. In his new position, Turiello will work with the manufacturing assembly, quality assurance, purchasing and customer service groups to support the company’s growth.
Turiello has over 30 years of engineering and management experience. He was most recently the manager of advanced manufacturing and product engineering for ITT Space Systems (Clifton, NJ). He holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, NJ), and has completed the Six Sigma process improvement certification.
PD&D caught up with Turiello to talk to him about his new position, the future of Bio-Chem, and his thoughts on the industry.
PD&D: First of all, congratulations on your new position. How are things going so far?
Joe Turiello: I’m enjoying my new role. I’m in a much smaller environment, but in my previous job it would sometimes take a year to build one of anything. When you build a satellite they don’t come off of the line like an M&M, you are building large, high customized systems that are extremely complex. So sometimes it’s hard to see the day to day accomplishments. Here, we build a very small, precise product, and I can make a change to the production environment and see an immediate impact. I get a lot of positive, or negative feedback right away. The cycle of implementing change is a lot quicker, and that is a refreshing thing for me.
PD&D: What type of experience do you have, and how will this knowledge strengthen Bio-Chem?
Turiello: I come off of a long term career with a large aerospace manufacturer, and I will be able to leverage the manufacturing technology techniques that I learned, and bring them to this business so we can move forward.
I worked with electronic counter measures, which are radar jammers that protect pilots, and after that I worked on the GPS satellite program. GPS has become a daily commodity, people are very used to pressing a button and hearing “you have arrived;” and working with electronic counter measures, someone’s life is in your hands. So the products that I produced were very important, number one, and needed to have a high reliability.
Bio-Chem products are primarily used in chemical testing and some medical applications, so while they make a smaller cog in the wheel, it is no less important than the larger system. The fact that I made high reliably products to exacting standards is a compatibility with what I did before and what I am doing now.
PD&D: What are some of the most significant changes you have noticed in the industry?