Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Use down time
to improve firm
by Beth Ewen
ONE OF THE TENETS of the quality movement is that every obstacle to providing a quality product or service presents an opportunity to improve. Every quality improvement, large or small, reduces waste, which lowers cost, time and resources, and improves both customer satisfaction and competitive standing.
The recession may be the biggest obstacle to business success in 80 years. It may also be this generation’s opportunity to look inside the enterprise, examine key processes, and implement improvement projects that make the delivery of goods and services as efficient and effective as possible. Consider the strategy of improving a company by reducing headcount in response to declining revenue.
What process improvement does a headcount reduction accomplish?
A company does not improve the quality of a product by making the same product with fewer people. The quality of the product is improved by attacking all the causes of variation, which in the process lowers waste and cost.
As the name suggests, Owatonna-based Kamp Automation looks for customers with a process they’d like to automate. It could be a small, inconvenient, tiny part that people can’t assemble. It could be a high-volume product so needed that the customer can’t find enough labor to produce it in the necessary quantities. “We’ll work anywhere from medical device companies to the seed industry for corn and soybeans,” says Kent Patterson, co-founder, president and CEO. “We just jump all over wherever there is custom automation.” The company started in his garage. Patterson and his partners built a machine. The company started to grow to the point where now it has 48 employees — and had a bunch of people and stuff in different locations. “We went from a garage to a shop to a shop and just kept moving to new places and signing leases,” he says. “We got to a point where it’s like, OK, this is getting big enough and sustainable — we felt that we wanted to look for our own space.’”
