AICC Xperience Panelists (CONT’D FROM PAGE 28)
McNay : The challenges we’ve faced have been driven by the availability of the workforce. As Covid’s kind of come and gone and you have people out for illness you begin to sap capacity. Then there is the turnover and skill level, when production times and makereadies get stretched. If you compound that over a week, a month or a quarter, you find that your capacity is lessened. We’ve found that we’re having a difficult time in convincing our team to work overtime, to work a Saturday. There’s now a different men- tality around work than a previous generation. We’re still figuring our how to best strike the balance and care for our customers and operations to get everything done. D’Angelo : How are you connecting differently with your suppliers and what advice do have for the suppliers in the room today? McNay: We’d just moved into our new building with our inside outside print capabilities and we didn’t want our suppliers to lose sight of where we where and who we were so we sent them a “care package” with an SMC shirt and coffee mug and on the inside of the box a layout of our plant along with a little message from our board that said “Do you miss us?” We don’t want our suppliers to forget about us. We miss those times when we could get togeth- er face to face and share a glass of wine and talk about the industry. This is one of the new ways we found to connect with suppliers because we knew we weren’t going to be CONTINUED ON PAGE 32
Stoler : We’ve added both people and equipment in response to our focus on e-commerce, digital print and short-run die cutting systems. The second area we invest- ed in was automation for all the reasons we’ve been dis- cussing. From the difficulty in finding people, to material handling and prepress, we continue to look for ways to automate. To address our focus on e-commerce, we’ve added people in our St. Louis and Bentonville operations to accommodate customers’ needs and growth. We’ve also added to our technology team for the reasons we’ve already discussed, whether it be the “hybrid” work envi- ronment or automation. We still need to find a way to “col- lapse” some of our processes and technology will help us do that without having to add more people. Harris : We were fortunate in that we added new equip- ment right before Covid hit and of course, when it first hit and after it continued, we didn’t know what to expect. Thankfully, the work started coming and it has continued. We were prepared. But we also figured out what our ca- pacity was during the pandemic and the months after. We got maxed out. We always had an idea of what we can do but we learned from this experience that we could more than that. We’re landlocked at our current production fa- cility but we do have another offsite warehouse where we could add more equipment. It’s certainly been a lot of strat- egizing for sure.
Let’s Tell Our Recycling Story
Investment, Jobs Created, Tons Produced
Rick Van Horne, Director of Creative Marketing srvan614@me.com Corrugated Supplies Corp. LLC
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March 14, 2022
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