From Supply Chain Issues to Productivity Gains with John Abplanalp

<p><strong>Lisa Ryan:&nbsp;</strong>Hey, it's Lisa Ryan, and welcome to the Manufacturer's Network podcast. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, John Abplanalp. John is the president and founder of Tight Lines Advisors consultancy, which focuses on optimizing manufacturing performance. So John, welcome to the show,</p><p><strong>John Abplanalp</strong>: Lisa. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.</p><p><strong>Lisa Ryan:&nbsp;</strong>Please share a little about your background and what led you to focus on manufacturing with tight lines.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>John Abplanalp</strong>: I will try to give you the quickest version possible. I was involved with a family business, a precision valve corporation. My father invented the aerosol valve. I'm looking at the patent copy in front of me right now.</p><p><br></p><p>He received the patent on March 17th, 1949. He is Swiss, but St. Patrick's Day was a celebration for my father that afternoon. He started their business. We ended up with 22 locations worldwide, serving most of the major customers, the SE Johnsons, the Unilevers, the record, Ben Keer, the who's who of, who's in the consumer packaging goods.</p><p><br></p><p>A lot of the products they had were in aerosol form. He passed away 20 years ago at the end of August 2003. If I drop some numbers, we made about 250 million in sales. We get some family dynamics - a sister and brother-in-law that didn't necessarily buy into what we were doing, where we were going, confidence about myself, et cetera. It's not a complaint about it. Everybody has a right to, so we made the deal of evaluation and allocation assets, et cetera, and got that behind us in 2006 and continued.</p><p><br></p><p>&nbsp;In 2008 we went from 250 to the end of our fiscal year 2008. We got to 343 million, and I'm proud of myself and the team for what we were able to do. That was the fiscal year of May 31st, 2008. You may remember a little turbulence in 2008, 2009. We went from 343 million in sales leverage from 343 to 290 million.