People: A fabricator’s greatest competitive advantage

When you walk in the front office of Gap Partners Inc. (GPI), a North Georgia fabricator we last covered in 2013, you don’t see many photos of machinery. Instead, you see portraits of people: those work on the shop floor as well as managers and other front-office personnel who support them. Every person is wearing a black GPI shirt, and on their forearm is written a core personal value: family, friends, commitment to others, and so on.

It’s easy to say “people are our greatest asset,” but as David Bowes, GPI general manager put it, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

Late last year, GPI ate some pudding. Several large customers experienced significant slowdowns, which slowed work at GPI considerably, but no one was let go.

You can argue that this made perfectly good business sense, considering revenue returned with gusto in January, but considering those photos on the wall, it may go deeper than that. According to Bowes, GPI has a culture that centers on teams that meet—be it during a formal kaizen event or informal brainstorming session—to discuss ways to do things better. But GPI, as well as its parent company Power Partners Inc. (PPI) and other progressive manufacturers, may be on to something.

It’s no secret that some view fabricators as commodity parts suppliers. You send out your request for bids, choose the best price, and that’s that. Many fabricators work beyond this, of course, and collaborate with suppliers on product design, scheduling, and supply chain management. All this—plus the improvement practices that ensure fabricators can respond quickly and deliver on time—come from people questioning the status quo and talking about a better way to do things.

Advanced machines have become the ticket for entry into this market. Shops really can’t compete without them. But unless those machines are custom-made and proprietary, anyone with enough resources theoretically can buy an identical ticket—that is, the same machines.

But unlike machines, people aren’t identical (outside the occasional twin). People are unique, and so it’s no wonder GPI puts them front and center. The ideas they develop, and the way they develop them, really can’t be replicated.

This flies in the face of offshoring. Hunting for cheap labor may have sounded good on an investor conference call in the 1990s, but it was dehumanizing for the people who actually did the work. Their factory job may have been designed so that anyone could come in and take their place. In other words, it was designed as a commodity.

But at PPI, that’s not the case. People question and, ultimately, have the power to change things. Moreover, PPI will probably be able to use this as a competitive advantage indefinitely. Competitors can buy the same machines and the same software, but they can’t employ the same people.