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Business View Magazine
While Sedlak is primarily a North American firm in
terms of its clients and its work, O’Brien says that it’s
not unusual for the company to serve clients in oth-
er parts of the world. “Most recently, we went as far
south as Antarctica, working on an entire campus lay-
out for the material handling at the McMurdo Science
Station,” he says. “It’s a station that’s over 50 years
old that was developed by the Navy and, therefore, it
operates a lot like a big ship in terms of material han-
dling and product storage. But it was built incremen-
tally over several decades, and this is their first time
rejuvenating it. ‘How do we prepare if for the next 50
years? How would we lay it out? How would we keep
people safe, under cover, and protected while support-
ing all the science, which is the whole purpose of the
station?’ So, we do go to the ends of the world to serve
our clients – literally – and that is work that will con-
tinue on for several years.”
Another recently completed project that the company
took on was a one million square foot, distribution cen-
ter in the southeastern U.S. for a manufacturer of ath-
letic footwear, apparel, and equipment. “It’s a highly
automated facility and from ground-breaking to first
shipments was eleven months,” O’Brien says. “It was
a real Herculean effort to pull that off. I’m not sure
that’s ever been done, before. Productivity-wise it blew
right past all of their existing buildings. And that says
something about the experience that we deliver when
we engage with a client. When a building has to open,
it will open on time and come up to productivity very,
very quickly.”
In addition to working with its portfolio of retail, whole-
sale, and third-party logistics clients, topping Sedlak’s
current agenda is making more headway into the field
of healthcare. “The healthcare supply chain is very
similar to the supply chains that we work in other in-
dustries, primarily the retail environment,” says Steve
Simco, the company’s Healthcare Practice Director.
“If you think of the primary infrastructure where peo-
ple get healthcare, it’s a hospital delivery network” he
