Jordi Brown
The machine that builds the machine. ‘The machine’ is the REM process; it refers to our people and our process functioning in unison, forming a manufacturing production system that delivers a product for the customer. We take your inputs, and your requirements, and work collaboratively with it. Where the magic comes in is the ability to scale that from either a single unit or up to 500 units, to best suit your business objectives. So the machine that builds the machine is the concept of all that working for you.
Customers choose ATS and ATS REM first, because we are one of the largest systems integrators in the world. We’ve been around since 1978, so well over 45 years of experience. We are proven to be the right solution. The company is traded on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and York Stock Exchange so we’re going to be here for the long haul, we’re going to support them. Customers see a lot of credibility; we can really drive a lot of value.
There’s a lot of core standard products out there; we are not always reinventing the wheel. We are trying to leverage the best in class of what’s available out there, ensuring that we’re bringing the right level of value to the customer.
Over the years, ATS has made a number of acquisitions; we’re looking at opportunities to either go upstream or downstream with our customers to make sure that they feel well supported. We’re trying to make sure that we bring value to the customer post installation by going in and providing relevant, real time data on how they can improve their overall cost of ownership.
Within our business, there’s probably 2 or 3 KPIs that we focus on:
One is On-Time Delivery. We have great success with 99.9% on-time delivery.
Second, our first-time quality is very high, making sure that we build the quality end of the process so that we can deliver the right results to our customer.
And our third thing really comes down to driving value, whether it be through our value engineering process or working with our engineering supply chain organization to really provide a year over year cost reduction to our customer. It could be a be a cost reduction or could be performance improvement, we’re going to improve your cycle time, your reliability or purely it’s how do we take cost out year over year?
You see a lot of value in that. And on how we really, embrace the opportunities over the years. And we’ve really driven lessons learned on programs to improve year over year. I think the number one thing I’m proud of is how we’ve grown, the organization from where we were 20 years ago to where we are today.
The biggest inspiration for me at ATS is the people, they’re the number one value for this organization; the number one asset. We really hold one another accountable; we challenge one another; we love to work together and help figure out how to solve customers’ problems. And with the wide range of people we have all over the world chances are somebody solved this problem before. With my experience, I’m able to usually figure out who the right person would be within the organization to tap into, to bring forward and help solve a problem and bring value to what we’re providing to our customer.
We’ve really turned the organization into a true corporation through acquisitions. The leadership team I think has been tremendous in making sure that we’ve got all the right tools or all the right assets we need to deliver to our customers what they need.
There have been situations where we’ve struggled to find the solution but, typically we can find the right group of people or the right organizations. And I think our Innovation Center is really a testament to what we’ve done. It’s really spawned a number of great innovations for ATS; it’s helped us improve on the timeliness of our ability to reduce lead time as well as reduce costs for our customers.
For customers that are unsure about what that success could look like please come to Cambridge to look at our innovation facilities. Look at the investments we’re making on trying to solve problems before they actually happen, as well as experiencing some of the things that we do here, some of the equipment that we produce, whether it be from our Capex businesses or from our repetitive equipment manufacturer and businesses.
