Business View Magazine | August 2020

48 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE AUGUST 2020 SPECIAL PRODUCTS & MFG. INC. plant - those folks can move around the plant very easily and then we don’t have to go out and hire and we become more efficient.” When there does become a need to hire more workers, once again, SPM relies on its company culture. “We’ve got an awesome reputation in the DFW area,” Grand-Lienard enthuses. “We’re known for our culture in being able to have a say-so in what’s going on. People want to work inside a culture like that. An example: last August, we needed 23 people to ramp up for a customer. We were able to hire those 23 people within ten days, and put them to work. Within 60 days, they’re productive. That’s just unheard of; other people would struggle to do that. We’ve got people who know what we’re about and they’re showing up. We also have a good referral program with our team going out to help us recruit. They get a bonus if they help pull in either a family member or a friend or somebody else they know.” Going forward, Grand-Lienard says that SPM is now concentrating on automating its processes: “We’ve automated a lot of equipment, and we’ve automated machinery, but we’ve not automated processes. So, we’re in the middle of automating our quoting process, right now. Our quoting process takes about an hour per job. We had 472 jobs come in a couple of weeks ago; the coronavirus scare had us bringing in lots of customers that had supply chain issues and we’re quoting a lot. 400 quotes is a lot for us; normally our backlog of quotes runs between 50 and 150. So, that’s 472 hours worth of quoting – that’s ten people for a week or one person for ten weeks. That doesn’t take care