Service: Operations Improvement

The company’s customers include automotive tire manufacturers, snowmobile OEMs, automotive OEMs, various industrial part manufacturers and the U.S. and Canadian defense departments.

Much of the company’s traditional customer base has been migrating to the Southeastern U.S. over the past 20 years. Additionally, several facilities were not producing near optimum capacity utilization, so there appeared to be room for consolidation. Given that the company’s production facilities are primarily in the Northern U.S. and Canada, the company asked Maven to assess its manufacturing footprint going forward and what strategic options are available to address this.

The Maven team evaluated various strategic options for addressing the company’s manufacturing footprint. The team developed a financial model to assess the impact of each scenario which included plant consolidation, optimizing product mix within the current footprint, exiting certain lines of business as well as potential strategic acquisitions. The team also assessed the potential customer and market risk for each move. Maven concluded that the maximum potential savings could be attained by combining plant consolidation with a strategic acquisition that would best align its future footprint with the geographic shift in its customer base. This option would enable the company to realize an after-tax increase in cashflow of more than $16M.

PDC has over 55 years of experience in the field and are the global leaders in innovative ID solutions serving Healthcare, Leisure, Entertainment, Law Enforcement and Animal ID industries.

One of the key factors in PDCs position as #1 in the ID industry is their sales force. Customers count on the personal attention, product knowledge, flexibility and dependability they provide. When PDC was looking to hire and train new sales people they realized their old training materials were not as effective as they could be and needed to be updated to provide a more robust training experience.

After researching other consulting firms, PDC chose Maven Associates to help create new training materials for their sales force. They based their decision on Maven’s ability to provide the same quality of resources in terms of personnel, methodology and thinking as the big three consulting firms, without the high price. On a tight six-week timeline, Maven worked with executive management and the PDC product managers to build an architecture for the sales materials. Maven then worked with each of the product managers to build the materials for the sales training. The overall goal was to simplify and standardize training across multiple products.

Throughout the process, Maven developed several insights about PDC that were not part of the original scope of the project, and shared them with the PDC executive team. Finding new information the client does not know about their own business and providing crucial outside perspective to clients, is value-added that Maven brings to each project.

After six weeks, the new, more robust, training materials provided the right balance of detail and information that PDC needed, while the templatized approach resulted in positive response from product managers and new trainees alike.

The combination of a growing company and an aging plant created the need for either expanding or relocating their manufacturing facilities. Raybern’s engaged with Maven to help them build the business case for moving the plant and to narrow down the choices of where the new plant would be located.

Maven worked with the Raybern’s team to develop a financial model that would evaluate the economics of either expanding their current facility or relocating the plant to one of several options in the Midwest. The economic analysis included changes to their transportation costs, raw materials costs, labor rates & utility costs. The model also accounted for differences in capital costs and economic development incentives across the different scenarios. The final output of the project was a board presentation recommending the relocation of the plant to one of the new locations evaluated.