CEO's Column

Chip Emery

Chip Emery

CEO

Leading Supply Chain Services in the rapidly evolving Automatic Identification and Data Collection (AIDC) marketplace brings many new and interesting challenges. From time to time it is useful to reflect on how we are dealing with so many "opportunities" and to share those experiences.

Over my years in business I have learned two cardinal rules. Number one, put the customer first. Number two, invest unceasingly in your core competencies. Applying these rules at Supply Chain Services has contributed to our growth--in customer satisfaction, in employee engagement and opportunity, in partner relationships and, gratifyingly, the bottom line.

Read on to share the ride...

2nd Quarter 2018

Expanding Your Product Offering – Internal Hurdles are Higher Than You Think

One of the hallmarks of a successful Value Added Reseller (VAR) is the ability to take on new products. Doing so starts out being pretty straightforward: new product, new tech…
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1st Quarter 2018

Sharing Our Talents with the Community

It’s not just money that drives a village. It’s time and attention. In February a number of employees took time out of their work day to read with elementary students…
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4th Quarter 2017

Remember That Old Joke About the Dog Chasing a Bus?

That joke finishes with “…the worst thing that could happen is you catch it!” Well we pursued Visuascan in Montreal for nearly a year and finally closed the deal on…
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3rd Quarter 2017

Your culture is what you work at continuously, even when you don’t know you are.

It seems to me that we spend almost as much time and attention working on our culture as we do on satisfying customers, booking new business or delivering what we…
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2nd Quarter 2017

Even Management can be Flexible

At Supply Chain Services, one of the key attributes of our culture is collaboration. Collaboration across departments, seniors with juniors, admin with sales, sales with IT, IT with OEMs, admin…
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1st Quarter 2017

Well the Inevitable Bump in the Road Finally Happened

While we grew modestly last year, it was the first year since the recession that we were off our internal targets. So halfway through the year, after learning the barcode…
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4th Quarter 2016

Does Top Management Really Drive Culture?

The CEO of a multibillion dollar public company, from whom we buy technical equipment, recently visited Supply Chain Services. It was an informal visit and we quickly learned that he…
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3rd Quarter 2016

The Curse of Growth : It Doesn’t Go On Forever

A while back I wrote about how rapid growth brings the curse of facility expansion and employee turnover. When that growth slows down substantially, it brings another curse, keeping employee…
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2nd Quarter 2016

Learning from Onboarding New Employees

Four new employees joined us last month, the first in what we expect to be a continuing flow of new folks this year. Despite our history of regularly adding people…
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1st Quarter 2016

Culture – It’s All About the People

We’ve had a few employees leave recently. It’s always a sad time when folks move on, regardless of the circumstances; a bit like losing as sibling. A lesson I learned,…
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4th Quarter 2015

Opening Your House

We sell and support barcoding solutions, and we do it well. But that's not what makes it special to work here. Last week we held an open house party for…
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3rd Quarter 2015

Turning Yawners into Dragon Slayers

The company’s strategic planning team met last month for a mid-year progress review and to brainstorm initiatives for 2016-2017. While preparing for these sessions sucks up a lot of time,…
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1st Quarter 2015

Just Ask Why (or What, Where or When)

Here at Supply Chain Services we have a customer-centric culture based on our purpose: Helping Customers Operate Better. At the same time we are consultative sales folks and believe strongly…
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4th Quarter 2014

Balancing Growth versus Profitability

Supply Chain Services’ revenue has been on a five year, roughly 20% annualized growth rate. This has been fueled by a combination of factors; external market recovery, an expanded staff,…
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3rd Quarter 2014

The OEM Territory Rep: Your Best Friend

Being a solutions integration VAR means you live at the intersection of your customer, your distributor, the ISV and your OEM. Thus you frequently find yourself playing the role of…
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2nd Quarter 2014

Lessons Learned from GM's Ignition Switch Problems

General Motors has been in the news a lot lately for its product safety problems. While it’s easy to play critic from afar, it seems to me that GM has…
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1st Quarter 2014

Major Company Surgery Part 2 (New Enterprise Software)

In the last issue I wrote about hiring an experienced consultant to help us decide on a new enterprise software vendor. We did that as an insurance policy to ensure…
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3rd Quarter 2013

Growing Pains Revisited

A while back I wrote about the plusses and minuses of moving to a larger facility to accommodate growth. A year later it seems like we’ve always been here and…
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2nd Quarter 2013

Being in the Middle is Not Good

The future for the world of rugged mobile computers, barcode scanners and barcode printers, referred to in the industry as the AIDC world, is becoming oh so murky: two big…
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1st Quarter 2013

Deciding Whom to Trust for Major Company Surgery

About nine months ago we decided to move forward on a new enterprise software system; replacing the patched together software on which we run our business for a new, state-of-…
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