My first outing as a part of Vermeer was a trip to Louisville last week, to take in the National Farm Machinery Show. I rode with five other engineers for the nine hour drive. We stopped in Indianapolis to tour Rexnord, a primary bearing supplier to Vermeer. Louisville has the largest UPS sorting facility in the world, so we toured that as well. The action starts there at about 11pm, so that's when the tours are. We were lucky enough to also get to try out their flight simulators. To give you an idea of how realistic they are, UPS pilots never touch a real plane during their training, and are completely ready for action when they are done with the several-month training. Granted, UPS only hires veteran pilots, but these trainers are exactly like the real thing. This tour took us around the 5.2 million square foot (120 acres under one roof!) facility. All sorting is automated, and most packages go from plane to plane in less than twenty minutes. Very impressive. This was very late on Valentines day, and someone noticed that there were many upset wives and girlfriends out there: about every tenth package was from Pro Flowers.
Sales and marketing people manned Vermeer's booth at the show, and the engineers were there to walk the show and look at the competition's technology up close. The NFMS is the biggest of its kind in the country. It's possible to see everything in one day, but I was a little stunned by everything and really just glazed over everything the first day. I dug deeper into the forage equipment the next day with a product guy and an enhancement engineer, who together gave me deep insight into details about Vermeer and the competition that I wouldn't have gotten by myself or from just looking at the equipment.
Aside from all I learned about equipment, this was a very good chance to get to know some of my coworkers. I'm looking forward to more travel.
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