Gap Partners’ revenues from existing customers have grown 50% in the past year because our team has embraced the mantra that it’s not what you get, but what you give.
It all started when the Gap Partners leadership team worked on better articulating our mission and values, taking the heart and soul of the organization and putting it in words. Our values are safety, quality, delivery, cost -- in that order. Thrill the customer. Rise to the challenge. Enthusiastically improve everything you can. Take pride and show passion in all we do. Encourage and serve daily. Think like an owner. Control your destiny.
The new mission, which we call the GPI Experience, is to provide our customers with customized, high quality, value-added, quick-response manufacturing solutions that enable them to fulfill their missions.
The Leadership Team started putting our values into greater action. We began to spend more time with our customers learning more about their missions, goals and needs. We now work with our customers on joint kaizen events, driving cost and waste out of our their facilities. We hold design to cost meetings with our customers for better manufacturability of their product lines. This allows us opportunity to drive cost down, and margins up. We work with our customers on inventory management systems to suit their facility and product lines.
We have actually incorporated a pull system that's much like a bread run, continually feeding product on a daily basis to our customer's site. We receive an email daily from our customer which gives us their inventory levels. When inventory gets to a certain point, we ship product. This has reaped great rewards in maintaining inventory levels at both their facility and Gap Partners.
Recognizing the great value in our teammates is at the heart of the GPI Experience. We're determined to invest in our teammate's lives through gain share, as well as supporting them in all endeavors to thrill the customer. We involve our teammates upfront in projects to gain full advantage of their expertise. We respect and honor the knowledge they have in taking a product from a flat piece of sheet metal to something extraordinary. We've incorporated the Dot Program, in which we reward teammates who go out of their way to fulfill the values of our organization by awarding a silver dot. Twelve silver dots net a $50.00 Walmart gift card!
Gap Partners has seen firsthand that when you begin to focus on the giving, the getting takes care of itself.