OneVision II

May 18

**SPF maintains operational alignment and continuous improvement across multiple manufacturing locations.**

Growth creates opportunity – scaling determines whether we can sustain it successfully.
As SPF continues to grow across our locations, maintaining alignment between teams, systems, and processes becomes increasingly important. Despite industry challenges, we’re outpacing ourselves in measures of success, and taking the time to make sure we’re *scaling responsibly*.
Our organization will scale only as effectively as our leadership team.

What is OneVision?

We fully believe that in taking care of the needs of our customers, our needs as a business take care of themselves. This belief is what drives us to improve, and these OneVision meetings are proof of rising to the challenge. SPF America has been a centralized, family owned business since 1977— nearly 50 years of production. In 2012, we opened our first separate location in Matamoros. In 2021, we opened another facility in Santa Catarina. Over these past 14 years, we learned we needed to develop a new organizational plan.

Introduce: OneVision meetings.

OneVision meetings are how we come together to understand each individual location’s realities, goals, pain points, and priorities. These meetings kind of operate like an open forum for our management, with allotted for all representing parties to be heard, voice concerns, and be key decision makers for solutions moving forward. Typically, leadership from each department of each location meet together to represent issues, strengths, and goals of each part.

In our very first OneVision meeting, we came together to understand the values would shape our company, as well as our overall mission and vision we have together. Now, on our second meeting, we’re introducing specialized training, realigning on our mission, vision, and values, and continuing to work toward understanding the unique challenges and goals each department in each location is facing. These meetings demonstrate why communicating, and understanding each part of our business benefits the whole. When we allow leadership to take form across our locations, the better off we are to handle bottlenecks, synergize, and face unique problems together.

We went into this meeting understanding certain realities and opportunities in our industry, but mostly understanding our role in navigating these. When scaling to meet industry demands, it requires:

Better communication
Faster alignment
Cross-functional collaboration
Accountability
Respectful conflict resolution
Operational discipline
Adaptability

The industries we’re involved in are continuously changing, and it reflects in both our suppliers and our role as a supplier. This meeting, we recognized where we’ve stepped up to the plate.
Here’s what we learned:
We continue to improve our process to catch internal issues.
We’re continuing to navigate raw material supply challenges.
We’re continuing to analyze and understand tariff obstacles.
Wins from last meeting:
Our Mexico market continues to grow.
We have developed a more organized, elaborate, and comprehensive process for copper supply.
CI Programs have been established in all locations.
We have diversified our customer profiles.
Electroplating production lead time has improved.

Day 1: Specialized Trainings

This is the first time that OneVision has seen department specific and specialized trainings. These trainings were arranged across various departments. This is to make sure our key players are aligned underneath the same training and keep our processes the same across locations. This not only helps the inside players align with other locations, but also helps our Admin teams and Continuous Improvement departments understand our internal pain points.

Thank you to Club House Kitchen for catering lunch, and to El Mariachi for hosting dinner!

Day 2: Reorientation

Day 2 was all about reorienting the team. After trainings were completed, we all took a trip to the Fort Smith Bakery District — a local hotspot for businesses, entrepreneurs, and non-profits. We were allowed to arrange our larger meetings here thanks to the UAFS Center for Economic Development.

First, we revisited our core-values, vision, and mission statement to re-coach our team in how they play out, and what they tangibly look like day-to-day.

Next, we got a pulse on each location.

We broke out into focus groups, refamiliarized ourselves on the previous meeting’s goals and objectives, and through open dialogue and detailed note-taking, we went through each location to hear reports on:

current realities
important internal and external shifts
key challenges
progress since last meeting
lessons learned
and last but not least, accomplishments and major achievements.

From hearing these reports, we found common themes and areas of opportunities for scaling and improvement.

Finally, we ended the day with a company dinner at Fort Smith’s Prima Italia Restaurant.

Day 3: Reprioritization

Day 3, we began to wrap up this OneVision event with an overview of company history and our main advantage as a manufacturer in the copper busbar market: vertical integration.

We also started with an overview of conclusions made from the previous day. This included current realities, our SWOT analysis, as well as our group votes on what we consider is important for scaling successfully and operational risks.

Leadership is seeing the bigger picture of how we work together. When trust, genuine connection, and goals align, we’re able to move forward together.

From there, we came up with achievable, yet ambitious, goals for our team to reach, and coordinated ourselves into strategic focus groups to handle them.

We ended the event on an incredibly serious tone - cookie decorating. Each team member decorated their own cookie for their favorite parts of this leadership retreat.

One company. One vision.

Meetings like OneVision help ensure SPF continues delivering consistent quality, aligned processes, and dependable support across every location we operate. These leadership retreats keep our efforts organized and keep us in alignment with each other and our goals across our locations.

As we move forward with refreshed leadership, we’re taking what we’ve learned from each other into our teams. Developing a culture around leadership, accountability, and productivity is how we are able to take on more, and uphold our values of service, passion, and fortitude.

Thank you to the UAFS Center for Economic Development for allowing SPF to use your space. Thank you to Micki Voelkel, Kendall Ross, and Kimberly Gordon for skillfully facilitating this event and continuing to be a knowledgeable resource for our team. Thank you to Southern Sips Event Services, El Mariachi, and Prima Italia for your incredible service.