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| Home > From the President |
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February 2008
People are constantly asking me why Western Pacific chose the human brain as our symbol. The answer is deceptively simple. Our company really is like a big brain--a kind of computer that's focused on a single mission: how to make storage solutions that work better and smarter. This is a huge change from a few years back, when we were more focused on engineering systems, building product and getting it out the door.
It's not just the product, it's the process that drives us now. If your factory is just making shelves, then once a day when the whistle blows and it's quitting time, no more shelves get made that day. But when your factory is making a new way to solve storage problems, the whistle never blows, and you're never done. By constantly questioning how you do things, by constantly tweaking, by creating an environment of continuous change, you don't outflank your competition next quarter. You outflank them next decade.
We've challenged everyone in our organization to restructure our brains a little bit every day, every week, to inspire us to do things better. And we're seeing the change: on the factory floor, in the engineering studios, in the sales and customer service areas and on the loading docks. The benefits of this kind of thinking are already rippling out to our customers in higher quality products and more responsive customer service.
We know that our competitors are moving up behind us like headlights in the rear view mirror. And we know that our people have it within them to keep us out in front at every turn. We're building an institutional obsession with improvement and a pervasive lack of complacency with whatever was accomplished yesterday. Success, in that way, becomes our platform for further improvement.
Our supervisors and managers now understand that their job is to find ways to do the work better, more efficiently, and more effectively, to teach and to facilitate, and in return the lessons are theirs to be learned.
We're all incredibly proud of what we've accomplished, but we know we can't stop to pat ourselves on the back. As a solutions provider, there is no finish line. There's always more to do, more to discover, and more to think about. Our "brain" reminds us of all of that: it won’t let us rest.
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