Business View Magazine - October 2016 77
North America’s at a point where the barriers to auto-
mation are falling and automation is becoming more
and more prevalent in manufacturing and distribution
markets,” he says. “Robotics is something that will con-
tinue to grow. I also think you’re going to see greater
strides in the fields of supply chain visibility, increased
development and advancement of control towers, and
the use of predictive analytics.” In addition, Banich sur-
mises that labor availability and the desire of people to
work in a distribution or manufacturing environment is
falling in many places. “So you’re
going to have to do something with
the fact that there are labor short-
ages, that goes back to my original
comment about the automation
plays in this space,” he adds.
A labor shortage is not something
that Miebach Consulting need
worry about. “Worldwide, we’re
just over 350 employees,” says
Banich. “That is small when you
compare us to the global strategy
firms, but look at the volume of
projects that the group has – well over a thousand a
year. It’s a significant portfolio.” The company draws
is employees from the top business, engineering and
technical schools globally, as well as from the indus-
trial sector. “We’re also bringing in people from other
consulting firms to ensure we’re getting other perspec-
tives on how others are approaching the problems that
companies are facing, today. So, we really try to pull
from everywhere. The important piece to us is to find
people who are going to be extremely hard-working,
extremely dedicated to the client, and extremely loyal
to the work and their fellow teammates. We see the
people that we’re bringing in the door today, as the
directors and partners of tomorrow.”
Banich explains that the company has a lot of indus-
trial and mechanical engineers onboard, because “not
only do we help on the strategic piece, but we very,
very much get in the weeds,” he says. “When we talk
about developing an automation strategy, we’re not
only saying, ‘What geographies and what type of op-
erations does it make sense to potentially automate?,
but we’re there, writing the specifications; we’re there
onsite as the cranes are going up and the concrete’s
being poured; we’re there through the testing and the
whole thing. We’re really trying to be a good, respon-
sible advocate for our client – from design, through
strategy, through go-live.”
Finally, Banich believes that even in the in the vast in-
ternational marketplace in which it provides its highly
engineered, complex, and innovative supply chain so-
lutions, it ultimately comes down to people working
with other people to solve problems. “Our people are
our secret weapon, if you will,” he reveals. “We have no
false illusions of grandeur about what we offer. There
is no magic formula that we have. We understand how
important our clients and our people are because at
the end of the day, it’s really the dedication and com-
mitment of our people to our customers. Without hav-
ing both of those, our firm would cease to exist.”
