Manufacturing
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ALMACO Deeply Leveraging CRM to Improve Efficiency and Accuracy
Ascend Technologies and ALMACO have a longstanding partnership, leveraging Salesforce as their foundational tool. ALMACO has embarked on the “Crawl, Walk, Run” journey under Ascend’s guidance, inching closer to achieving a “single source of truth”. As Jayson Schwienebart said, “Everyone’s putting information somewhere. Let’s be intentional about it the first time and eliminate error and…
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Satellite Manufacturing/Distribution Sites Moving to Des Moines
About 15 years ago, Bill Wright, with CBRE first saw the trend of manufacturers and distributors across the state begin to co-locate final assembly or distribution facilities in the Des Moines metro to take advantage of the workforce, the confluence of I-80 and I-35 and the other amenities the golden circle offers. Today, companies take…
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35 Year John Deere Leader Shares Path to Chief Product Officer and Beyond
A fascinating conversation about Tony Thelen’s journey in manufacturing, starting as a coop student in Deere’s Waterloo Works, to management, sales and marketing and finally leadership in their precision ag facility, developing technology for autonomous ag equipment. Precision ag gets to the millimeter detection of weeds to spray ONLY the weeds. The saving on herbicide…
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Optimizing For a Diminished Workforce and Tight Margins,
Adopting his “ambitiously lazy” mindset while in public accounting, Brian Shadle has always had a passion for streamlining processes to create efficiencies. In the beginning it allowed him to feed his biking and hiking habit while living in Colorado. Today that passion has turned externally with his company Midwest OpX in helping executives and teams…
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Iowa’s Quest for Health is Harder than Once Thought
The Healthiest State Initiative is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with the vision that every Iowan has the opportunity to live their healthiest life. The pandemic had many lingering side effects. One of those is loneliness. A little-known fact is that loneliness has such far-reaching consequences that the health impact is comparable to smoking up to…
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30 New Products, 11 Patents, 2 New Leaders. Feed Energy Takes Role of Helping Feed the World Seriously
This jam-packed podcast with the brilliant Bob Riley (Doc Fat) weaves a tale that winds from regenerative farming and the amazing work of Liz Garst with White Rock Conservancy to Lisa Shulte Moore with C-Change at Iowa State University, an interdisciplinary research initiative to innovate around regenerative farming, to his own fascinating personal story of…
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Improve Your Employee Retention in 15 Minutes
On this podcast with 25 year recruiting veteran Jim Roy, we’ll learn that the first 15 minutes of the onboarding process has a huge impact on the retention of that employee. Did you know that 86% of new employees decide whether to stay with the new organization within the first few months? That 22% said…
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Teaching Kids to Fail Well is the Key to Innovation
I would argue that no organization in our state is doing more than the Science Center of Iowa to introduce young people to innovation, making and manufacturing. And as Jolie Pelds reminded me, making is a way of thinking, of using familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, of focusing on the process rather than the end result.…
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Back to the Basics in Manufacturing Technology
On today’s Iowa Manufacturing Podcast, we are speaking with Michael Bird, CEO of Spindustry. Spindustry helps organizations, often manufacturers, with website and e-commerce strategy, digital marketing, and SharePoint services for those using Office365 for office automation. Our focus today is on manufacturers getting back to basics when it comes to marketing and data management. Often…
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Learn how private equity turned Inland Coatings in Adel into a multi-state, thriving organization in just a few years
Midwest Growth Partners (MGP) is a private equity fund manager, responsible for more than $325 million of private capital across multiple funds. MGP seeks to make succession planning liquidity or growth capital investments in established companies in underserved rural markets which are managed by great people who share a cultural fit with our team. While…