Company Attributes Growth to Increased Efficiencies

Companies around the world are looking for ways to become, or remain, competitive. One obvious way to do that is to save money. When the economy is booming, it’s easy to be less concerned about money. But, when the economy is struggling or in recovery, companies quickly look to save money. Simply put, saving money is a policy that should be followed all the time.

One company that realizes this is the Harvard Corporation of Evansville, Wisconsin. Harvard (http://www.harvardcorp.com/) designs, develops, manufactures, and sells partial-flow filtration systems and filters that remove water and dirt from oil for improved cleanliness levels for applications from aerospace to mining. Harvard’s systems reduce maintenance costs and the amount of generated liquid waste.

As other companies catch on to the need to reduce costs and save money, they turn to Harvard. The result is that Harvard has seen their sales increase 15 percent this year. “It’s because of the fact that people are looking for ways to reduce cost, and we have a reputation of helping people reduce their operational costs,” said President Otto Knottnerus.

Not only does Harvard work to help other companies reduce their costs, they also have worked to improve their own manufacturing efficiencies. They worked with the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership to gain a fresh look at manufacturing and to better develop contacts and marketing ideas. The top priority is to become as efficient as possible. “My goal is to continually be my own best competitor,” said Mr. Knottnerus. “I’m always looking to improve in every aspect of what we’re doing here.”

Most of the systems that Harvard works with have a return on investment of less than a year. This is interesting because FARO has a very similar goal. FARO develops computer-aided measurement and imaging systems that permit high-precision 3D measurement, imaging, and comparison within production and quality assurance processes. Many of the solutions that FARO provides to its customers improve those customer’s processes and efficiencies so much so, that they too see a return on investment of less than a year. As Mr. Knottnerus so correctly said about a quick ROI, “It makes it really palatable for people to do something.” Not only does it make it palatable, it only makes sense for companies looking to be competitive in today’s economy to look at and to do anything possible to improve efficiencies and save money.

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