Mengel, a plastics 'data hound,' set to retire

Jeff Mengel, the widely known Plante Moran guru of plastics data, is retiring on May 31. That means NPE2018 will be his last industry event.

Mengel, 62, said he wants to retire early while he still has his health. He plans to travel a lot with his wife, Nancy, and to explore the "human condition" around the world, to "deal with various aspects of humanity."

He will continue his long involvement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's Chicago chapter.

Mengel plans to do "minimal consulting" through Plante Moran, and he said he will be very selective.

And he will keep in touch with industry veterans as a member of the Plastics Pioneers Association, after getting voted into PPA last year.

As Plante Moran's plastics industry team leader, Mengel has given hundreds of information-packed presentations, sprinkled with funny insights, at industry events over 23 years. He has toured countless plastics factories. And he has headed up Plante Moran's landmark North American Plastics Industry Study, a major report that many plastics companies use to benchmark.

Plante Moran conducts the study on a continuous basis and makes two reports a year: The big general release and another one at the annual Manufacturer's Association for Plastics Processors Benchmarking Conference.

Mengel's often-repeated comment — if you participate in the survey, which is totally confidential, you get the results for free — has kept the study growing since it was started by Tim Erdmann in the mid-1990s. Erdmann left Plante Moran in 1997 to move into management and consulting positions in the plastics industry. He returned to Plante Moran seven ​ years ago.

Now Erdmann will continue in a leadership role with the seven-member plastics industry team. Mengel said he and Erdmann are both "data-hounds" who are passionate about the plastics industry. "But he's got the scar tissue [from working in manufacturing]. I don't have any scar tissue," Mengel said.

"I'm thrilled about the fact that I have a team that can carry on," Mengel said.

The plastics team covers a broad range of areas, including operations, strategy, costing, and auditing and tax accounting.

Several team members have hands-on plastics industry experience, including Erdmann and Ted Morgan.

But when the plastics focus began, it was a team of one person. Erdmann spearheaded Plante Moran's move into plastics. He put together the first plastics study, building it from scratch. Mengel got involved to help him with the study. Then Erdmann left. It was "next man up." Or in this case, next data-cruncher.

"My partners at the time said, 'Hey, do you want to continue with this? Do you believe this stuff about plastics?' And I said, 'You know what, I do believe it.' And they said, 'OK, you're tapped. You're going to take it forward,'" Mengel said.

Mengel said his education and insights have come from analyzing about 1,900 NAPIS reports and visiting 50-100 factories a year — more than 1,000 tours over the years.

"I'm both a data nerd and industrial tourist," he said.

Plante Moran works with more than 200 plastics clients, about evenly split between auditing and consulting.

The North American Plastics Industry Study gives Plante Moran "data cred."

"It may not fit Harvard Business Review's definition of what a survey should be. This is the best there is in the industry," Mengel said. "And so it gives [processors] the opportunity to measure how they're doing. And frankly, it gives us a lot of information because we do a lot of strategy work."

Mengel is a lifer at the accounting and consulting firm. He earned an accounting degree from Michigan State University in 1979, then he went right to work at Plante Moran as an auditor. You learn a lot in that job.

"Frankly, that's the cool thing about being an auditor: You have to be completely open with the auditor when they come in. You see all the dirty underwear of all the companies. You get to see what's good. You see really good companies, how they operate, and you get to see bad companies, how they operate. You're getting all the details."

But it's safe to assume that many people in plastics don't know that Mengel is an accountant. He doesn't talk like one. There's no CPA on his business card.

"I don't put it on there because I don't want to be put in that box," he said.

He does know plastics — just not the "tweak the injection pressure" type of knowledge.

"When somebody asks me, 'Can you tell me if I'm doing good or bad?' Yes, I can tell you if you're doing good or bad. And I can tell you about your business model, whether it makes sense. But don't ask me to change, technically, how you operate," he said.

But he has worked on that, too, once spending two weeks of vacation doing all the jobs at Lakeside Plastics Ltd., an automotive molder in Oldcastle, Ontario, across from Detroit.

For Mengel, a vacation is running molding machines.

"They put me through their training program, which I thought was very nice of them. And they got free consulting out of it," Mengel said. Lakeside Plastics officials asked his impressions. His suggestions included fully automating their machines. He praised management for fantastic employee communications.

That's what Mengel will miss the most: the people. "It's the biggest thing I'm going to miss is all my friends in the industry," he said.

And the plant tours.

Having the data from the Plante Moran report opens a lot of doors.

"I can get an audience at a lot of companies and say, 'I'd like to come visit with you. I'll share with you some information that's about your industry and your process. And I'd love to have a tour.' They say, 'Sure, come on in! We'd love to have you,'" he said. "So, the conversation's not me selling them anything. It's me sharing some financial information, and they're sharing some observations of issues they have. And I've learned from that."

Companies often post news about a Jeff Mengel visit on their websites.

The Plante Moran plastics group is what Mengel calls "adaptive consultants" rather than technical consultants.

"If you're looking to change your spots, we can help you with that. If you're looking to go into a new industry, if you're looking to acquire somebody, if you're looking to find out how structurally or organizationally you could change, we're really good at that. If you're looking to say, 'I want faster throughput,' if it's lean culture, we can help you with that. If it's, 'Tell me how to spin the dials to make it work better,' that's not us. We're not going to tell you how to cut your cycle times," he said.

Looking ahead for the plastics industry, Mengel is pumped up about Industry 4.0, which connects everything together.

"We're seeing companies that have demonstrated this, and have really showed how significantly more profitable and competitive they are, to their peers," he said.

Mengel said Industry 4.0 will help continue the reshoring trend, for molding work on products for the North American market.

"That's where I think there's a huge opportunity, and I'm excited about that," he said.

"So, if you have these smart factories, you put them where you consume the product. Not where it's the cheapest," he said.