Introducing Automation Talk with Kendall Howard’s Randy Herreid

Editor’s note: In partnership with Salvagnini America, FMA has launched Automation Talk, a new video podcast series. Sign up to receive notifications about new episodes. Watch the first episode here.

Automation Talk, a new video podcast series, has launched with our first guest Randy Herreid, who founded Kendall Howard in 2000. You could call the Chisago City, Minn., company a manufacturer of server racks and other IT infrastructure and furniture products, with a growing custom fabrication division, KH Custom Solutions Group—but that really doesn’t describe the place. A “product company” might be the best way to describe it. If someone has an idea for a product, Kendall Howard makes it a reality.

As a company that offers marketing services and other peripherals to help customers sell and grow their products as well as product development and manufacturing, Kendall Howard is a unique animal.

“All the services we do for ourselves, we can offer to our customers,” Herreid explained.

In our discussion with Harried, we discuss how his approach to automation helps manage a work flow that varies out of necessity. We discuss the different levels of automation that fit Kendall Howard’s business model, as we will discuss with future guests on the video podcast.

The company’s “automation recipe,” of sorts, has allowed Kendall Howard to pursue its unique business model, which, by the way, does not involve eliminating jobs with automation. Herreid never dwells on automation’s “labour-saving” attributes. He instead dwells on the opportunities that automation provides. Without it, the company’s approach to business simply wouldn’t work.

Because of automation, people aren’t competing for resources. And instead of focusing on the minutiae of quoting or tool selection, more people have time to concentrate on the big picture: product design ideas, strategies for ramping up production, and more. Put another way, the automation let’s more people at Kendall Howard focus on the business’s key selling point: making an idea a reality.

In future episodes of Automation Talk we’ll discuss different levels of automation and how each company we explore has a slightly different approach to it. Automation is a necessity in shops today to create the efficiencies to thrive. See how your journey compares to some of your peers with us.