The company’s name is Steinwall Incorporated. We are a thermo-plastic injection molding company located up in Coon Rapids. We are a durable good manufacturing; most of our customers are like a John Deere or a Bosch. They make the finished components.
The equipment and raw materials are pretty generic. So, the only differentiator today is going to be the human element and moving forward, and that has been my focus for my whole career. And its a huge competitive advantage for us.
Most of what my competitors are doing is automating out the human element, we’ve done that also. But there’s still the human being that needs to be involved in running the automation. We’ll hire folks that are just mechanically orientated and then we have a training process and a communication process that works very very quickly to bring them up to speed.
It’s not always about the money, it’s not always about the benefits. Those are, those are given. Now its “What can we do as an organization to empower the people to have a better career path?”
I’m actually publishing what I know about this in little books and handing them to my customers; they absolutely love it. So, not too many injection molding companies are actually publishing literature that helps people tap into the human element.
-Maureen Steinwall