Impressions Marketing Group

Source: Retail Digital

Date :25/05/2007 04:11:47

Impressions Marketing Group: Mentoring Impression-able young minds

Written and produced by James Buchanan & Nick Ledue

Store fixture company Impressions Marketing Group is partnering with its local high schools to develop the next generation of skilled employees

No matter what business you are in, the ability to find and keep the best employees is a key element of a successful company.

For those companies that serve large retail outlets, being the quickest to market with the best level of quality also requires having employees that can think on their feet, adapt to increasingly automated machinery, and work with the latest systems planning software.

“People are always key, and we feel our people are one of our real competitive advantages,” says Boe Young, VP of Impressions Marketing Group (IMG). “Getting the best and the brightest is necessary when you are serving the best and biggest companies in the country.”

IMG is a designer and manufacturer of retail store displays and graphics. As Young says, the company could generally be considered as a retail solutions company, providing display, fixtures, consolidation, installation, product development, and graphics solutions to its customers. Clients go to IMG with a concept or idea they want implemented in their stores and IMG helps develop that into displays and graphics that merchandise the products or other services that fulfill that need.

Seems simple enough, but the store fixture and graphics industry is very competitive, with a number of companies competing in the categories of quality, lead-time, and price.

Therefore, to attract the biggest national chains requires having employees that can distinguish the company in the above three competitive categories.

To further this goal, IMG has embraced a strategy of community investment and internal staff development to home-grow the best talent. This has led the company to an innovative collaboration with area high schools near its Washington, N.C., manufacturing and distribution facility.

The company is headquartered in Lorton, Va., where it has another manufacturing and distribution center. IMG also has a West Coast distribution center in Stockton, Calif.

The North Carolina facility, though, has become a significant job creation source for Beaufort County.

“Our fabrication facility in North Carolina is located in a rural community where only 30 to 40 percent of the students are likely to go to college, and the unemployment rate is usually two to three times the national average,” says Young. “What we offer is an opportunity for these students to train on equipment and processes used by a national firm that is one of the biggest employers in the county.”

Essentially, the company has partnered with area high schools to create a vocational curriculum focused on teaching the skills students need to succeed in state-of-the-art fixture manufacturing plants such as IMG’s. This involved changing the curriculum from general carpentry to one focused on fixture fabrication. The program has also received approval from the state’s board of education.

The program of study is especially designed for students that do not anticipate going directly to college. Those students that successfully complete the program, says Young, will have the opportunity to “launch a career, not just go get a job.”

One innovative aspect of the partnership, Young says, is that IMG will provide the specifications and materials for various products, and will pay the schools for the cabinets the students build.

Another benefit, says Young, is that students will concurrently learn the basics of running a small business – the cost of materials, scheduling, cost of labor, invoicing, and so on.

Once school is out, there are still opportunities for students and teachers to learn and hone new skills. IMG is offering internships for 10 students while construction technology teachers from all three of the regional schools will work with IMG in the summer to learn the company’s processes.

The program may also expand beyond the high school level, as the company is working with the N.C. Department of Labor and the Beaufort County Region Q Workforce Mid-East Commission to establish an apprenticeship with the local community college. This program would offer additional training to provide a career path for students. It will also be available to current IMG employees.

“As just one measure of how the local community embraced the program,” says Randy Roark, general manager of the North Carolina facility, “is that the schools invited us to address all of its 10th and 11th graders in the school’s auditorium and listen to the benefits program.”

And when these students graduate and — hopefully — come to work for IMG, they will be part of a company that serves some of the largest retailers with display and graphics, he adds.

As an example of what the company is capable of, Young drew on a previous job for Home Depot.

Previously, Home Depot had only sold home improvement materials to customers who then installed the equipment or did the building themselves. The company decided it wanted to compliment its products with related services and they needed in-store kiosks and advertising to highlight this new approach.

Home Depot approached to IMG with some concepts in mind and asked the company to design and rollout a display to advertise Home Depot’s new strategic initiative, Young explains. In only a few weeks, IMG and Home Depot collaborated on the design, built several prototypes and began the manufacturing. Once completed, the products were manufactured and IMG coordinated the rollout process to the client’s 1,500 stores.

“Coordination for a program like this, and many others we have handled, has to be precise,” says Young. “It is not unusual for our products to need to arrive on a specific time and place, at multiple sites across the country simultaneously. There is a lot of coordination and management. It goes well beyond just making the products, to be sure all of the elements are in place for the rollout and everyone is on the same page.”

Further, keeping large retail customers happy is as much about the cost and quality of the products as it is about the service and turnaround time IMG is able to meet.

“The American retail market is the most competitive in the world,” says Young. “Speed and responsiveness are key, because retailers are always looking for new ways to move new ideas and concepts to market as soon as possible. That means weeks and days, not months.”

To meet compressed lead times IMG has put together a cross functional product development team that includes all elements of the company, such as engineering, design, manufacturing, and sales.

As a group, they take a client’s concepts and flesh them out.

“It’s easy to make a pretty drawing,” says Young, “but the client is going to have a price point to meet, the design has to also be functional, and it has to improve the selling of the client’s merchandise.”

Young adds that the cross functional team is one of the biggest innovations the company has developed.

As to production capacity, Young says IMG runs up to two shifts in each fabrication facility, which keeps the companies ample machinery humming.

In the past year, IMG has invested more than $2 million in new equipment for all of its plants to increase capacity. Purchases include replacing older equipment that didn’t have as much throughput capability and adding a new manufacturing line in the North Carolina plant, which increased capacity by approximately 25 percent. Also, all of the equipment is CNC (computer numerical control) driven and networked together.

“The North Carolina plant is likely the most efficient store display fabrication factory on the East Coast,” says Roark.

He goes on to say, “We have to have the ability to manufacture and integrate a wide array of materials, whether it’s wood or metal or acrylics or foam; we are very capable of using those materials in a variety of manners or applications.”

Being efficient and fast also means having suppliers that are able to cater to the company’s needs. According to Young, IMG doesn’t have any supply chain issues per se, but commodity prices are always changing.

Fortunately, he says the company is large enough so that it has quite a bit of purchasing and negotiating power.

Roark says the company seeks long-term contracts, which gives Impressions’ suppliers additional security of knowing its work will be steady and allows it to provide consistent pricing to IMG.

Consistent supplies and the latest equipment must also be managed in an efficient manner. In fact, IMG has a full-time lean manufacturing manager that coordinates the efforts of the design and manufacturing teams, Roark says.

“We have built many of our products thousands of times,” Roark says, “but we frequently find that the Lean process will allow us to be even more efficient.”

On the technology side the company invests heavily in new equipment, including its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The ERP system is a product of Global Shop Solutions and is used to track inventory and acquire real-time data relative to the manufacturing process via barcode scanners on the manufacturing floor.

Young says IMG is among the first in the industry to implement an ERP system, and its trade association has written on its implementation.

The ERP system also helps the company in its goal for on-time-delivery of its products. For IMG this is the most important performance metric, says Young, and the company has employed systems to measure how they are keeping to daily schedules.

“For national clients we have contracted with,” says Young, “We are at a 99.5 percent on time delivery rate. More than anything else, this can be credited with driving our growth over the past few years.”