A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

CS: Is that what you did? How did you overcome that obstacle?
PG: We did. We used a combination of a really maniacal focus on operating efficiency and rapid growth. Counting steps, figuring out how to handle items and material only once, and we are big believers in the “lean” approach to manufacturing. The Toyota production system is something we believe in here. We’ve used those kinds of approaches to eliminate most of the waste from our process. We’ve used that in combination with rapid growth to get to a point where we were able to reduce our costs and turn a profit. Use of automation, both physical automation in terms of machinery, and information technology, was important to direct all of this.