Let me start by saying this has been a milestone year for me—coincidentally, I finished my 60th trip around the sun. For me it was a time to consider retirement timing or determine I might not ever stop. But retirement or not, no one works forever, and most companies, organizations, teams, groups, continue on without them. Continuing hopefully on the same or better growth path or impact trajectory than the one on which they’ve been.
I’ve been fortunate enough to fill the role of Chairperson of St. Onge Company for the last eight years, and will for several more, but at forty-two years in business, St. Onge has been guided by several other leaders before me and grown and evolved under each. Though I think evolution is not quite the right word to describe the change at St. Onge over time, it’s been much faster than that and allowed St. Onge to grow from its four founders working exclusively on distribution and manufacturing facility design and operations to 170 professionals providing insights, value and solutions across entire supply chains, including hospital and healthcare facility designs and supply chains. We grew from a small office in York, Pennsylvania to executing projects all over the globe supported by offices across the US and overseas.
As the company grew and changed, well, our brand changed. Who we were, what expertise we provided and where we provided that expertise, changed and grew. Along with it, the logo with which we represented ourselves, the face we turned towards our clients and potential clients, changed.
From our first logo, in 1983, which aimed to represent the future of the warehouse and manufacturing facility design we provided our clients, looking to what the future of automation, properly applied, could offer them.
St. Onge Company was their objective partner in selecting the optimal automation and technologies for their particular operations. And this is still a cornerstone offering of our business today.
Our second brand, circa 1990, represented our company as we expanded our services from facility design to distribution and warehouse management systems to logistics network analysis. We added retail distribution to our facility design and supply chain channel expertise and began to offer our clients assistance in procuring 3PL logistics partners, just as we had been guiding them to optimal capital equipment purchases and implementations since our inception. We also standardized our data analytics tools for order profile analysis, providing a decreased timeline and analytical sophistication advantage to all of our facility design clients.
With a new millennium came a new brand as well in 2000. This communicated our brand and service offerings truly going global. We had executed work on every continent (except Antarctica). Under this brand we opened offices in Europe and Asia and solidly extended our services all over the world. As important as our geographic expansion was, even it was overshadowed by the start and growth of our healthcare logistics offerings. The unique offering provided our skills in material movement and logistics optimization to teams designing and building hospitals and clinics all over the United States, and ultimately beyond our borders.
After nearly two decades our branding evolved and changed again to communicate our growth in service offerings—from engineering, to specifically supply chain engineering. We had added end-to-end to supply optimization capabilities through key additions to our staff. Those additions enabled us to guide our clients to S&OP, SIOP and Inventory Planning & Management strategies and improvements like never before. We also added multiple time tested and experience vetted tools to our facility design capabilities, standardizing how we provide excellence in facility design engineering to our clients. All the while our healthcare offering continued to grow, serving an increasing number of clients and projects annually and growing the complexion of our offerings—including robust vertical and pneumatic transport design capabilities to the practice.
And, as all stories eventually do, this one ends with our current brand iteration, today’s face to our client and prospect audience. But this is not an end, but a current state, where we are at the moment. Not only representing of course our namesake founder, but incorporating our unwavering aim to take our clients higher and farther to perfecting their supply chains than anyone else can, our ubiquitous “O” no longer just an image of the globe, but now a symbol, representing that aim, ever upward and ever forward. No, it’s not an end at all, but a current state, an organizational milestone.
But all organizations are made up of people, each a part of the organization’s milestone, yet experiencing it in their own individual way. For me the personal uniqueness of this year’s milestone has been watching my colleagues and team navigate a changing demand environment, adding resources, capabilities and focus to areas that were growing of their own accord, sometimes too fast for comfort, helping them establish solid service offerings that were at one-time only fledgling capabilities, working with them to identify the best new offerings to develop, supporting their needs for offerings growing faster even than we hoped, and promoting our most mature offerings to ensure they remain a cornerstone of our company.
Perhaps just as importantly, is my being of the good fortune to be a part of a team of professionals that have become an “Inc. Best Workplace” for the third year in a row, and for the 15th time in 18 years being selected to Supply Chain Brain’s “100 Great Supply Chain Partners” list.
We have had much change, and so much growth, not just during my tenure here, but starting before I was fortunate enough to join St. Onge and inevitably continuing long after my departure. We hope recognizing the change will help us leap forward in our growth, igniting more change, and spurring even more growth, so we can continue to provide value to all our clients—past, present, and future. It seems logical to recognize that change over time in the way we present the organization’s face to those not lucky enough to be a part of it.
Welcome to our new face. I hope you like it as much as we do. After all, it is who we are.
—Bryan Jensen, St. Onge Company
