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The concept of “lean manufacturing,” as Joe Day describes it, was a new one to Americans in the early 1990s. A somewhat complex, but highly effective methodology designed to lower a manufacturer’s costs, reduce waste, shorten delivery times and improve quality—all at once, ideally—it had been in use by the Japanese for some time already (notably at Toyota, but also elsewhere in Japan), but remained largely unknown by American industry. Until Joe Day, then CEO of Freudenberg-NOK (FNGP), a billion dollar automotive supplier outside Detroit, made the introductions.
“I was recognized for installing the methods at our company, then teaching them to some of our customers,” says Day over the phone from his winter home in Palm Beach. “I guess you could say I Americanized the practice.”
Day, a 1966 graduate of Lowell Tech with a degree in plastics engineering, has been retired now nearly three years. From time to time as he talks, he excuses himself to gently shush a grandchild—he has 10, the offspring of six daughters—who has turned the TV volume up just a bit too loud.
Freudenberg-NOK, he explains, is the U.S. company that was created as a third partner to two other firms: the German Freudenberg and the Japanese NOK (the three, together, rank as the largest non-tire rubber fabricator in the world). “So, with the Japanese heritage we had already,” he says, “the introduction of lean manufacturing came pretty naturally to us.”
Day served for 14 years, from 1988 to 2002, as CEO of the American partner-firm, a maker of oil seals and vibration-dampening devices—and widely recognized today as among the North American benchmark companies for lean manufacturing systems. Prior to that, for eight years, he was with the Dexter Group of Hartford, Conn., where he served as president of several of Dexter’s businesses. And for the 15 years before that—beginning just weeks after his graduation from Lowell Tech—he was with GE, where he worked his way through several sales and marketing spots to finish as general manager of a company-owned plastics firm.
Through every phase of his 37-year career, he says, from the earliest days as a sales trainee right through to the top job at Freudenberg, he was “wonderfully well served” by his four years as an engineering major at Lowell Tech.
“It gave me,” he says, “just a great technical basis for understanding the details of manufacturing, as well as a broad general grasp of what it takes to run a business.”
In gratitude for those early foundations, he has decided, he says, that the time has come to give back: “I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had a great career. And now, being retired, I have an opportunity—to help prepare other students, through the same tools I was given, to create great careers of their own.”
To this end, Joe Day has made possible a gift to the University: $405,000, $270,000 of his own funds, with the remainder as matching monies from the state. Half of this amount will endow UMass Lowell scholarships in the science tracks of plastics and rubber engineering; the other half will benefit the chancellor’s discretionary fund.
“This is an extraordinary gift,” says Executive Director of Advancement Matthew Eynon. “For Joe to show this level of generosity to the University is really indicative of his commitment—both to UMass Lowell and to the plastics and rubber industries. It also, I think, serves as a pretty great inspiration for any other alumni who might be considering how or whether to give.”
This is not the first time Day has been involved in the gifting of money to the University. As the Freudenberg-NOK CEO in the late 1990s, he oversaw the company’s funding of a professorship in rubber technology: “We saw the need for an increase in the number of rubber and elastomer (a synthetic rubber) engineers. So FNGP subsidized the hiring of a professor [Plastics Engineering Assoc. Prof. Joey Mead] to try to address that need.”
But that decision, he says, was more pragmatic than personal. Freudenberg-NOK had five factories in New Hampshire at the time, and UMass Lowell—“a source of both engineering talent and technical support”—was a logical choice for the company’s subsidy funds. “It was an easy decision,” remembers Day today. “The credit really goes to the University and Freudenberg-NOK.”
The more recent personal gift, though, is a different matter altogether: “My entire career has been devoted to the plastics and rubber industries. That work has been my life. So really, to have the opportunity to give back this way—to be able to help prepare UMass Lowell students to succeed in the same fields—that’s a very special thing for me.”