T-R PHOTO BY NICK BAUR — Alexa McCulley is an industrial engineer at MARSHALLTOWN Company, where she works each day optimizing the many different processes and systems involved in the production of the different tools and equipment manufactured there.

For Alexa McCulley, each day at MARSHALLTOWN Company brings a wealth of problem-solving opportunities and challenges as an industrial engineer for the local business, and as she says, she wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

“It’s challenging. I like to be challenged,” she said. “I think it would be boring if it wasn’t.”

As an industrial engineer, McCulley is responsible for the optimization of the complex processes and systems involved in the production of the different tools and equipment manufactured by MARSHALLTOWN Co.

Industrial engineers are central to manufacturing operations and essentially, find ways to eliminate wastefulness in production processes.

“Getting all the materials ready to come in, making sure that our operators have an ergonomically friendly, safe work environment to work in,” McCulley described. “Getting all of those parts and components set up so that we’re as efficient as we can possibly be at getting product out the door… We’re always focusing on making things better.”

Not only concerned with the actual production of the goods, McCulley and her team of industrial engineers also focus on evaluating products once they leave the production line.

“Our group also focuses on quality,” she said. “If we have a customer that has a quality complaint, something broke with their tool or something’s not working the way that they expected it to, we’ll investigate on the floor here to see if we have a production problem or if it’s something else that we can help educate the customer on.”

McCulley’s career path has been a relatively singular track for the veteran industrial engineer, who found her passion for the field early while she attended Roland-Story High School in Story City.

“Being so close to Iowa State during high school, I did a lot of the Women in Science and Engineering [WISE] programs that Iowa State offers for high school students,” McCulley said. “I was always drawn to math and science.”

Although it’s a historically male-dominated profession, McCulley says she was never deterred by the gender imbalance and partially credits her persistence in engineering to the positive experiences she encountered at ISU’s WISE program.

“It was never something that made me feel uncomfortable or just feel like it’s something I couldn’t handle because of that,” she said. “The WISE program that Iowa State has is really wonderful, empowering women to feel like we can do this too. We can be engineers, too.”

Though she attended ISU as an undecided engineering major, she felt herself quickly drawn to the industrial discipline, which provides a unique blend of interpersonal contact and application of practical engineering know-how.

“I think it’s a great mix. I think you still get the technical side of it, but then you get that personal connection side of it too,” McCulley said. “I really like spending time out on the floor with operators, getting their feedback. They’re the people that are doing these jobs every single day over and over again, so they are gonna come up with some really good ideas.”

It’s this keen ear and collaborative spirit in which McCulley says is the secret in succeeding as an industrial engineer and helps to make much-needed breakthroughs in efficiency and industrial design.

“I really like to try to listen to what people have to say,” she said. “That’s something that if you’re going to be an industrial engineer, you need to have that quality.”

Now having been at Marshalltown Company since 2018, McCulley came to the area after feeling “burnt out” at a large corporation in the Quad Cities.

“MARSHALLTOWN Company was really enticing. It’s a small, still family owned business, and I really liked the feel of that when I came to interview here,” she said. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve just really enjoyed it. We’re small, but we’re growing so much since I’ve started.”

With the company building two additions to its Marshalltown facility and another at their Arkansas location, McCulley has seen a lot of expansion in her time at the company. In the past few months, she also directly helped to facilitate the acquisition of the California-based Wal-Board Tools, the largest acquisition in MARSHALLTOWN’s history.

“I am really pretty proud of how that all turned out,” McCulley said. “We had a very short time period to get that done and we were able to do that and bring it here and successfully are up and running now.”

As for the advice for other aspiring female engineers, McCulley was ardent in her encouragement for the next generation.

“They should go for it. There’s no reason not to,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to do something hard because you definitely can do it.”

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Contact Nick Baur at (641) 753-6611 or nbaur@timesrepublican.com.