Listened to the Q2 earnings call again. I was wrong when I said there wasn't much new about Q2 specifically. There was some great explanation by Mr. Wilson about what's been done with QCA, and it's all in line with Alpine's overall strategy of acquiring under-producing assets, optimizing them and putting them into the asset producing phase, as he says. At QCA, from what I heard, they have put in place an expense control system for overhead allocation and a variety of other costs. They've implemented flex workforce initiatives to control costs. They've refined tracking of the production period from a 2 week period where the visibility into where things were in the process was lacking, and got tracking down to the hour. And they've got their quoting time to customers down from 2 weeks to 3 days. That was a really detailed explanation of the optimization phase, as he calls it, which I haven't heard before. All of that is designed so basically QCA can complete more work in less time and with more efficient use of resources. Combine that with the backlog of orders from existing customers which was mentioned and I think we will be seeing QCA become net profitable, as they have been indicating. Plus this new acquisition, which is "an add on" to QCA, sounds like it's another step in expanding and maybe diversifying manufacturing capacity. Plus, if they systems they are developing and implementing become really successful, those management systems themselves could become product offerings in the future.
Also it's really nice to listen to a CEO who appears to know what he's talking about and can really articulate what's going on. It's a breath of fresh air.
