The last week of April, Houston’s Rebecca Phillips, Geoff Dann, Amanda Hackathorn and Jarrod Bowren were invited to the Carlisle Foodservice headquarters and manufacturing plant in Oklahoma City, OK, and they were accompanied by our local Carlisle Broker, RHI. This trip included tours of two manufacturing plants, Carlisle’s distribution warehouse, and a meeting inside the corporate office. The goal was to share both Carlisle and Houston’s industry knowledge and to find ways to increase Carlisle’s market share with Houston’s through an improved partnership.
Carlisle’s manufacturing plants were extremely clean and very well organized. All of the employees were focused on their specific job, but they also had a very good idea of how their job tied into the overall manufacturing and company goals.
Carlisle’s core values can be summed up in seven simple concepts:
- Customer Focus
- Teamwork & Communication
- Bias For Action & Results
- Continuous Improvement
- Safety
- Mutual Trust, Respect, & Integrity
- Empowerment
To help everyone follow the same path, they actively promote their employees, creating ideas on how to improve their specific job and department. This ranged from organizing a work area to make it more efficient when looking for supplies on all shifts, to improving their speed when changing out very large production molds. The ideas that have been used have resulted in an increased efficiency rate, which has in turn allowed them to expand their operation. It was impressive to find that by taking these tactics they were able to produce the same amount of product in half the time.
When our Houston’s team entered into the meeting portion of the tour, there were several departments that made presentations. Marketing, Customer Service, Accounting, and Sales all took their turn explaining what they do best. They described Carlisle’s vision and the partnerships the company holds with its customers. What was most impressive was how they all had the same message and used united phrases to describe their department and how it tied into the company goal. Their presentation and company culture left us impressed and with an improved perspective of Carlisle’s overall model.
The Houston’s team can certainly learn from the path that Carlisle has blazed. Carlisle did an excellent job presenting itself and talking about its partnerships. Overall, the meeting was full of good information.
When working with our own customer’s, it’s important to keep in mind that the best way for our vendors to increase business with Houston’s is to keep an open dialogue about how their company interacts with ours and where our mutual interests align. After this visit with Carlisle, we know so much more about their company, but there remains room for us to educate them about Houston’s. The foundation of our relationship has improved and we can now move forward by better educating them on the full extent of our services.
This article was written by Jarrod Bowren, Houston’s National Sales Manager.
