GlassCast: Ric Schmidt of Viprotron stresses the importance of quality

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Glass Magazine’s Katy Devlin sat down with Ric Schmidt, president of Viprotron at GlassBuild’s podcast studio to talk through what customers want from the company’s glass scanners, how the company is preparing for the next five years and what manufacturers need to know about AI.

Ensuring quality goes beyond ROI

Schmidt stressed the importance of reputation in the glass industry when speaking about why ensuring quality is critical. “In the glass industry, the raw materials we’re using are flawed. We don’t have perfect materials coming in to make perfect products,” he says.

He acknowledged that companies invest in order to gain efficiency and profit, but reminded listeners that glass can lose 100% of its value before leaving a facility if it’s quality is not checked. “If you don’t have quality as a part of your process – at every stage of glass production, after it’s washed, laminated, tempered – that’s the sort of thing that can devour profits,” he says.

Making “bad glass” can hurt profits, damage relationships, and also how your business is viewed, he said. “It’s an intangible thing called reputation – if you put out bad glass, you can lose your whole business.”