Faster and Higher

Doug Ellis stays in a hurry whether he's in school or managing his textile company

By Mark Clothier

Southern Mills CEO Doug Ellis prepares to scale the Eiger in the Swiss Alps.

Doug Ellis tore through Georgia Tech in about the same time it took Stephon Marbury to reach the NBA. But while he's a marathon runner and mountain climber, Ellis is no basketball player. He attended Tech in the early 1960s and earned a textiles degree in four quarters.

Ellis is CEO of Southern Mills, an industrial fabrics manufacturer with four factories in Georgia. Southern makes press covers, bags and baskets for industrial laundries; grass-catching bags for lawnmowers and flame-retardant material used by fire departments, race-car drivers, the military and NASA.

His brief time at Tech was preceded by four years at Princeton University. After Tech, Ellis spent two years at Harvard University Business School.

"Tech accepted some of the math and science from Princeton. But for several courses, I read texts, talked to professors and took the tests. I was getting old," he says. "It was time to go to work."

He was 25 at the time.

"I don't know of anyone who has gone through in four quarters. They were very helpful to let me schedule that. I had to go to all the labs. I had to take mechanical engineering, organic chemistry. That was a killer."

After graduation, Ellis came back to Atlanta to work in the family business: textiles. His father, Bill Ellis, started the business in 1925 with $20,000, half of which was borrowed.

Ellis, 63, says he started his work career by implementing an inventory control system and phasing out a product line that had outgrown its need: replacement seat covers for the auto industry.

Then he moved up to vice president and general manager in charge of marketing. At the time, Southern Mills had five manufacturing sites: one in Roswell, Ga., that was closed in 1974, one in Atlanta's West End, two in Senoia, Ga., and one in Woodbury, Ga.

In 1964, DuPont came out with a flame-retardant fabric called Nomex. The chemical manufacturer went to Southern Mills because it made heat-resistant materials for the commercial laundry business--bags, baskets and press covers--that might have a use for Nomex.

Ellis says Southern Mills did its initial tests on Nomex at Georgia Tech's textile school. The company set up a team and ran production out of the lab, at one point spinning 1,000 pounds a week.

Ellis moved production to the Senoia plant. Once Southern Mills figured out how to dye the material, it was able to sell it for all kinds of uses, including fire department uniforms, astronaut clothing and the suits worn by race-car drivers. Southern Mills does not cut and sew the fabric. It sells it to the people who do.

Southern Mills-spun Nomex was worn on the moon, although Ellis can't remember which mission.

"But it's nice to be able to talk about it," he says.

Ellis says each school "offered a different experience, all useful. I had liberal arts at Princeton, and my studies became more specialized as I moved along. Tech gave me a wonderful background in textiles and polymer chemistry. Harvard was terrific for general business practices.

"We still have a very close relationship with the textile school," he adds. "The staff has been very helpful to us over the years. Fred Cook, the head of the textile school, runs a very good organization over there. Wayne Tincher, one of the professors, knows a lot about dyeing fabrics and polymer chemistry."

Ellis now spends half his time working as the president of American Textile Manufacturers Institute, a Washington lobbying group with a 32-person office. The group's members represent 80 percent of the industry.

"It's mostly a lobbying group, but we're also working with standards, regulatory agencies, and trying to open foreign markets and ensure fair trading practice and that everyone plays by the rules." Ellis plans to stay as chief executive officer of Southern Mills for a few more years, then continue as chairman. He has hired Phil Vincent, IE '66, to work as president and chief operating officer.

Southern Mills is a private company with 600 employees and about $100 million in sales, Ellis explains. That's up from 1963, when Ellis arrived from Harvard Business School to start work in a family business with $5 million in sales. Of 1998 sales, 12 percent were export. The rest were spread equally throughout America, Ellis says.

The business that started making fabric for commercial laundry is still the largest of that sort. But Southern Mills also sells the fabric used in mower bags made by Jacobson, John Deere, Murray, Toro, Snapper and Honda, among others.

Southern Mills also developed the first pad used under the AstroTurf in the Houston Astrodome. The company made the turf pads for at least six stadiums, including Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

Southern Mills is still working with Nomex, now figuring out a way to print on it. Ellis would like to print a camouflage pattern on the material for use in the military. GT

Mark Clothier is an Atlanta freelance writer.

Jun-Seng Li, president of J.B. Hunt Logistics, is setting the industry standard.

Already president of the logistics division of J.B. Hunt Transport Services, the nation's largest publicly traded carrier, Li was also named executive vice president of integrated solutions for the transportation giant last year.

Li, who received his master's in industrial engineering in 1986 and a doctorate in 1989, built the logistics division of Schneider National of Green Bay, Wis., the nation's largest privately held trucking company, before being recruited to J.B. Hunt, one of Schneider's biggest competitors, in 1994. Li immediately transformed Hunt's fledgling logistics operation into the fastest-growing division of the company.

Although experts predict that logistics is the future of the trucking industry, few companies do it well. Li uses the skills he learned at Georgia Tech and from industrial engineering Professor John J. Bartholdi to define the way logistics is done. He has developed computer systems and software applications that allow the company and its customers to track their shipments on the Internet and know exactly where the freight is at all times.

"That is what separates us from the competition," Li says. "No other company has even gotten close."

Hunt now has some of the largest logistics contracts in the nation, including such companies as J.C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Target, Anheuser-Busch and Weyerhauser. Li's division of the company grew by more than 60 percent last year.

In his role as executive vice president of integrated solutions, Li is finding other ways technology can make the company more efficient and profitable. He hopes to blur the lines between the company's divisions, to transform Hunt from its traditional role as a freight hauler to a company that can solve any transportation need.

Li's rise to the top of his profession was not the traditional climb up the corporate ladder.

He was born in China in 1958. His father was a newspaper editor in a city of about 40,000 people. Soon after Li's birth, his father was imprisoned for writing articles critical of the Chinese government. The family was forced to relocate to a rural province. There, they endured demanding physical labor and hunger.

"It was a terrible thing to happen to my family, but it shaped my character," he says.

His father was released from the labor camp after two years and finally exonerated by the Chinese government in 1979. When Li was four years old, a famine swept China, claiming the lives of millions in the province. Two of Li's siblings died, one sister at 13 months, a brother at 7 days of age. Li barely survived two bouts of typhoid fever.

Although he excelled at school and finished high school at the top of his class, because of his father's imprisonment he was not allowed to attend the university. That didn't stop him from learning. He studied English by secretly listening to Voice of America broadcasts, his head under thick blankets, the short-wave radio pressed to his ear. He read every book he could find and taught himself science. After Mao Tse-Tung, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, died in 1976, the government opened the universities and held examinations nationwide.

Li scored high enough on a battery of government tests to be allowed to attend the university. He was required to major in English because the country needed English teachers, but his first love remained science. He continued to study it on his own. In his senior year at Hefei Polytechnic University in Anhui Province, he was selected-again based on test scores-to study under Bartholdi and other American professors.

Li received a master's in business administration during those studies in Shanghai, then returned to his university as an assistant professor of management science and assistant director of the university's department of research. Two years later, in 1985, he accepted a scholarship to Georgia Tech. He was presented the Institute's prestigious Wunch Award, and was named the school's Outstanding Young Engineer in 1995.

In May, Li returned to Georgia Tech to visit Bartholdi. It was his first time on campus since his graduation.

"I've always wanted to go back," Li says. "Dr. Bartholdi is my role model."

Li and his wife live in Springdale, Ark., with their two children. They became naturalized American citizens in 1996. Last November, he put on his suit and voted in his first election. "It was one of the happiest days in my life," he says. "I love this country." GT

Jim Lovel is a freelance writer in Little Rock, Ark.

When Toyota began entertaining ideas of building light airplanes, the automaker recruited Ed Hooper to help earn its wings.

Edwin H. Hooper, AE '61, who spent most of his career at Beech Aircraft, is directing Toyota's newest venture, developing light aircraft. It's an idea that Hooper says could do more than fly-it could revitalize the country's general aviation industry.

"The main thing that intrigued me was the focus of this entire effort from Toyota to strive to revitalize a very ailing industry," Hooper says.

While corporate jets have sold well, general aviation is trying to pull out of a nose dive. In 1979, the small aircraft industry sold about 20,000 planes--a figure that declined to less than 1,000 planes a year a few years ago. But three years ago, shortly after Cessna started making small planes again, sales began to pick up.

One reason general aviation has been dormant for the past 15 to 20 years is product liability. Some of the major manufacturers dropped out of building single-engine planes.

NASA also is trying to help get the industry airborne again with a program it calls AGATE-Advanced General Aviation Technologies Experiment. NASA chief Dan Goldin is trying to bring new technologies to general aviation to make it safer, less costly and more accessible. "The desire is there, and it looks like the opportunity is there for Toyota to help revitalize an industry that has just been really down," Hooper says.

Hooper heads a staff of 30 engineers working in Gardena, Calif.

"It's quite new," Hooper says. "We're just barely past the concept design phase, beginning to put things in place for manufacturing and detail planning."

Toyota began studying the aviation industry after its chairman, Hiroshi Okuda, established a goal of generating 10 percent of Toyota's sales from non-automotive business within the next decade. The automaker is also studying the marine industry.

"Toyota's airplane program is strictly a feasibility study," says Diana De Joseph, with Toyota's office of National Media Relations. At this time, Toyota has no definite plans to introduce an aircraft to the market.

Explains Hooper: "The key is going to be: Can we produce this airplane for significantly less than some of the airplanes that are out there today?" Although the plane would cost less, he says, it would have superior performance and would be loaded with modern technology.

Hooper's goal is to "design an airplane that brings new materials, new technology and automotive manufacturing efficiencies together to see if we can significantly reduce the price tag." He envisions a four-seat, reciprocating, propeller-driven plane that is both stylish and affordable.

Built of all-composite construction, the plane would have low-drag air-flow characteristics and today's computer-based avionics and instruments. Instead of a slew of gauges, the panel would be designed to "look like a laptop computer," says Hooper.

A native of Greenville, S.C., Hooper went to work for Lockheed Georgia after graduating from Tech as a co-op student. There he became a specialist in flutter vibrations.

After moving to California, Hooper joined Beech Aircraft (now Raytheon) in 1973, where the product line ranged from prop-driven, light planes to corporate jets.

As with many people in the industry, building aircraft is more than a profession for Hooper, it's a hobby. He has been a member of the Experimental Aircraft Association-a organization of pilots who design and build their own planes-since he was a student at Georgia Tech. In the 1970s, he assembled and flew an open-air biplane.

"I kept it for a lot of years, but it is was tubular steel and fabric-real old technology."

Surprisingly, Hooper says Toyota hasn't given him a firm deadline.

"When I worked at Raytheon, we were very schedule-driven to develop and certify new airplanes," he recalls. "I was very much driven by schedule. I'm used to that.

"But Toyota's attitude is that schedule is not so terribly important. And the money we spend on research and development is not so terribly important. What is important is that we conduct a diligent, process-driven program, step-by-step, and conceive the best airplane for that particular market.

"Then we prove it with prototype hardware, the manufacturing processes and flying; tweak it, make some changes; and then make a final decision to certify it. They said we've got to do the best dad-gum job that was ever done. And if we can do that in three years, fine. If we can do that in six years, fine."

Eager to see the project succeed, Hooper sees it as an opportunity "to perhaps set a real milestone for general aviation in the future. If we can make airplanes affordable and fun to fly, a whole lot easier to operate than they are now, it could make a tremendous difference." GT

John Voeller says low-tech can be more important than high-tech. He's not a fan of invention for its own sake, dismissing research that lacks purpose.

For this, he's considered a visionary and honored by Engineering News-Record magazine with its 1998 award for most significant individual achievement in the construction industry?

Absolutely, yes.

ENR editors said they picked Voeller, chief knowledge officer for Black & Veatch Co., "for his pioneering efforts in championing effective information-technology (IT) management at Black & Veatch, and for his technology leadership in an industry rarely appreciated for its high-tech prowess."

This honor comes one year after CIO magazine gave him its Enterprise Value Award.

Voeller, ME '71, earned his accolades first by leading the company team that developed PowrTrak, a database that handles all aspects of the firm's core work-designing and building power plants, including two nuclear facilities under construction now in Taiwan. He's putting finishing touches now on CygNet, the company's next-generation IT system that executives hope will slash total project costs by up to 30 percent.

In January, Voeller added the title of chief technology officer for BV Solutions Group, a new consulting company formed by the spin-off of Black & Veatch's IT department. Projected revenues for its first year: more than $40 million.

He's also patented a scanning technology-and he occasionally tinkers with hot rods.

"I have no kids, no hobbies and a very cooperative wife," Voeller says of his 80-hour weeks. "I do this because I love to do it."

He describes his job as unique--basically, looking more than five years down the road.

"My businesses are using data-centric knowledge; that's tactical," Voeller explains. "My developers are now building a decision-centric network, and they already understand where they're going with that. That's strategic. My job is to figure out what comes next."

Voeller elaborates on the role that knowledge plays in business.

"Many organizations really have three kinds of knowledge, no matter what their business," he says. "One is process knowledge, where you figure out a way to do something, 'proceduralize' it, tune and optimize it, and do it again and again. An example is figuring out a way to buy a complex piece of equipment, like a boiler.

"Second is spot knowledge, or 'lessons learned.' An example would be when a manufacturer says a valve has a certain type of problem and everyone in the organization needs to know.

"Third--the one most people miss--leads to cumulative decisions. An example would be whether to locate a facility on a certain site. You can say yes or no in one sentence, but the path by which you reach that yes or no could come in a lot of different sequences. Still, once you've traversed that, you know at least one path to reach that decision. Do you store that as a 'unique lesson learned,' or under the general category of 'making that kind of decision?'"

CygNet, Voeller says, is based on decision-centric thinking--and it's not really a high concept.

"It's the low-tech stuff that actually is the most powerful," he says. "We think we've discovered a missing element in all of computing: that a decision is atomic, and everything you do is designed to reach a decision or is a consequence of a decision. That being the case, you organize information using decisions as the key."

Similarly, he says, it was a simple order in the late 1970s that led to the creation of data-centric PowrTrak.

"The boss said put everything in one place and make sure we enter it one time," he recalls. "You can't get more mundane than that."

Voeller says his first job after college graduation taught him not to get too high-minded.

"When I came out of Tech, it was right at the height of the aerospace layoffs and even the guys with 4.0 [grade-point averages] didn't get offers. I'm convinced to this day that I got a job because I checked the little box in the corner of the application that asked if I'd accept field assignments," Voeller says. "Most of the guys had an elevated view of themselves in suits, sitting in offices. I just wanted to get out there. I went to work for Westinghouse and got put on a construction site in New Jersey. There I was, trying to run 150 craft labor people at 22 years old. Running craft labor is a tough proposition, especially in New Jersey.

"But I learned an intense level of respect for the people who have to get the job done. I had a great time talking to a fitter foreman; he was fascinated with quantum physics. One of the millwrights is probably a multimillionaire now; he was investing in a little company called Fairchild Semiconductor when no one knew what a semiconductor was," Voeller says.

"I learned that when someone who's in the thick of things speaks up, you should shut up and listen-to throw in the trash any presumption that where they are in the chain of command has any parallel scaling to their knowledge.

"If I had been put in a classical engineering design job, in an office, I don't think I would have enjoyed that perspective, and I couldn't have done what I have without it." GT

Karen Hill is an Atlanta freelance writer.

C. Peyton Day is carrying on his father's legacy. Day heads Day Hospitality Group, an Atlanta-based company that owns and operates 10 Marriott company hotels. Like his father, Cecil Day, Peyton Day runs hotels. Cecil Day founded Days Inn of America, a chain of 330 hotels across the Southeast.

The Days Inn chain sprang from a Day family trip to California in 1970. Peyton's father was frugal enough to avoid staying in Holiday Inns every night. The only other national hotel chain option was Motel 6, but they didn't have pools, which the Day kids wanted. Cecil Day, who was in commercial development, saw an opportunity. He had some land on Savannah Beach, which is now called Tybee Island. He decided to build a family-style hotel with a pool.

There, in the flagship hotel of the Days Inn chain, Peyton Day got the hospitality bug. He worked there over summers and vacations, cleaning rooms, scrubbing the pool, working the desk--anything that needed doing around the hotel.

Peyton's father died at 44, when Peyton was 17. A few years later, in 1983, the family sold the hotel chain. By then, Day had graduated from Georgia Tech, IM '83.

The benefit of attending Tech was never much of an issue as far as his father was concerned, Day recalls.

"I'd go with Dad on business trips and he'd always point out how this guy was a Tech grad or that guy was. He was quick to point out he went to Georgia Tech. He knew he wanted me to go and figured if it worked for him, it probably would work for me.

"Also, the work ethic and the tremendous legacy of successful business people really kind of gave me vision for the future."

Day grew up expecting to follow in his father's footsteps, "but that all changed when Dad died."

Instead, Day started C.P. Day Development Company. He built single family homes, mostly in Dunwoody. He was 23. Day went to the University of Virginia to study business. He earned an MBA in 1988 and came back to Atlanta to work for Trammel Crow Company, in office and industrial leasing and construction. But the idea of getting back into the hotel business had not left him.

"In the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to be in hotels," he says.

Day met Fred Cerrone at Perimeter Church. They decided to go into business together, building Fairfield Inns, an affordable hotel chain under the Marriott brand.

Day is in charge of site selection and putting the money together, while Cerrone is building on his years of hospitality management experience.

Day Hospitality built its first hotel, a Fairfield Inn in Alpharetta, in 1995. The company recently broke ground on a 10th hotel project. Day expects to have 15 up and running by the end of 2000. The privately held company employs 250 people. It is on pace to take in $12 million in 1999. Day, 38, expects to do about $16 million in 2000.

Day Hospitality builds limited service Marriott hotels, including Fairfield Inn, Residence Inn, Towne Place Suites by Marriott and Spring Hill Suites by Marriott. Most are in the Atlanta area. Recently, Day decided to start building hotels in Macon and Charlotte.

But while the hotels are not Days Inns, Day still carries on his father's legacy. Cecil Day did not put bars in his hotels. He wanted an atmosphere more conducive to families and drinking did not mesh with his beliefs. For that reason, Day "decided we wouldn't do Courtyards [by Marriott] because you have to have a bar."

Day's values shape the day-to-day operations of the hotels as well.

"When Fred and I started this company, we asked ourselves what kind of company we wanted to work for," he recalls. "And we laid out a 22-point value system."

The values include hotel general managers spending five minutes a day talking with the management team about the value of the day and five minutes talking about a training tip related to the value, Day says.

The company also offers employees a 3-month paid leave of absence after five years of employment.

"With the cost of training and retraining, it's the best money we can spend," he says. "If you can keep someone five years when the industry average is seven months, do the math."

So far, the philosophy has paid off.

Day was named one of five finalists for the Metro Atlanta Small Business Person of the Year in 1998. One of his general managers was named GM of the Year for the Fairfield Inn brand. And the Alpharetta hotel placed first for friendliness.

"We've been very fortunate," Day says. "Things have worked really well. That philosophy has worked really well."

And even though Day is walking the same path his father walked, he's doing it his own way.

"I'm not trying to do what he did," he says. "My main concern is not trying to be the biggest hotel company in the world. It's how you positively impact the lives of those who work with you." GT

Mark Clothier is an Atlanta freelance writer.