BLOG

Sometimes striving for excellence means showing the same dedication that you have in creating a beautiful garden and bringing it into the Accounts Payable department.

When Kandi Braspenninx was a child, her grandmother inspired in her a love of flowers that has stuck around to this day. From roaming her grandmother’s garden to creating beautiful floral creations for entire wedding parties, Kandi has the freedom with her flowers to create beauty from what once was just dirt and a few seeds.

Kandi brings the same determination and hard work that she uses to keep her garden flourishing to her role at Kamps. In the 13 years Kandi has been with Kamps she has seen the company grow and been involved in the computer system changes that have kept up with that growth. From her first days at Kamps doing manual voucher entry to today where she handles most of the accounting tasks for our East region, Kandi Braspenninx has committed to learning new skills as challenges arise.

From the health of the company to the health of a garden, Kandi understands the importance of growth. Thank you for your commitment to grow and learn at Kamps, Kandi!

6/25/18— Kamps Pallets, a national pallet company headquartered in Grand Rapids, MI, announces partnership with Corrloc LLC, a corrugated pallet and packaging company.

Dan Gibson, Corrloc co-founder, says, “Corrloc will be widely adopted in the market place due to its cost to strength ratio.  Our customers will no longer have to choose one or the other, it will be based off what best fits their needs.” Corrloc technology will be used across industries to solve the unique challenges that lies ahead in the industry. The biggest gains for our customers, is the cost saving in the realm of shipping expenses, preventing product damage, and the feasibility of recycling the product.”

“Because Kamps is a recycling company at its core, Corrloc was a perfect fit for us. It can be manufactured from recycled materials, and itself is 100% recyclable as well. This product will allow Kamps to offer multiple solutions to our customers in both wood and paper, for their pallets, bracing, dunnage and packaging needs.  We are very excited to partner with Corrloc and offer the product on a national scale.” said Brad Rietema, Kamps Executive VP of Corporate Services.

Kamps plans to add Corrloc technology and manufacturing to its national network and work with existing, and new customers to see how Corrloc can best benefit them. The first CorrLoc manufacturing site was fully operational in Niles, MI in May of this year.

About CorrLoc

Corrloc LLC is globally focused with local roots and takes an environmental and cost effective approach to alternative packaging products. Corrloc offers many different packaging solutions including pallets, dividers, braces, rails & cases. Each solution is engineered to meet your specific packaging needs.

About Kamps Pallets

Kamps Pallets is a full service pallet company delivering innovative pallet and packaging solutions to customers across the United States. Kamps specialize in custom pallet management processes, high-quality products and excellent customer service. Based in Michigan, Kamps has nationwide facilities to meet the shipping needs of industries from coast to coast, including wood pallets, plastic pallets, and corrugated pallets.

Corporate Maintenance – Automating from Scratch

Kamps Pallets looks a little bit different than 11 years ago when Frank Swartz started in maintenance at the Grand Rapids, Michigan plant.

Kamps has grown significantly in both geographical span and number of employees since Frank started in maintenance. With that growth has come a need for increased automation in our plants and facilities.

In his first years here, Frank was tasked with fixing forklifts, maintaining semi-trucks and other facility maintenance. A decade later, Kamps is keeping Frank busy executing a vision towards increased automation in all the plants across the country. Simply put, when Kamps needs something to increase efficiency in our operations process, Frank and other members of corporate maintenance set out to build it.

One thing that hasn’t changed in the eleven years that Frank has worked for Kamps is the importance of striving for excellence. The corporate maintenance team exhibits this in their endless effort to solve problems, big and small, for their fellow employees.

During our conversation, Frank casually mentions building a chain fed trim saw from scratch and pulls out pictures of the machine stylishly painted in Kamps colors that now sits in the Grand Rapids plant. This is the kind of humble ingenuity we see daily here from the corporate maintenance team.

But it is no surprise that Frank has been able to create as needs arise here at Kamps. Growing up on a blueberry farm meant there were plenty of opportunities for Frank to learn about equipment and how to fix it. It also means that Frank now has a hatred for anything blueberry.

Here at Kamps we recognize the creativity and dedication it takes to keep up with a growing company. Keep up the good work, Frank!

Do you love meetings? No, of course not. Most people dread meetings and prefer to have fewer or no meetings because when you are in meetings, you are usually not being productive. We can go into why businesses spend so much time in unproductive meetings, but it’s not going to help your business to understand why. Instead, we’ll focus on how to make meetings more productive.

Here are some ideas for making meetings more productive:

• Have a clear focus – Make meetings focus on a few key things such as current work priorities, what issues are creating problems, and what needs to be resolved. The bottleneck issues can become action items. A short meeting of this type, daily or weekly, can keep things on track.
• Don’t forget an agenda – This seems obvious; you’re having a meeting! What’s the agenda? What are we going to talk about? The fact is most meetings have no agenda, and if your company has meetings with no agenda, you are wasting time and money.
• Appoint a leader and time tracker – Someone should be leading the meeting and someone, perhaps the same person, should be keeping time. But regardless of who does it, someone should be in charge of making sure each meeting stays on track.
• Avoid trying to solve every problem on the spot – Don’t try to completely solve all problems in the meeting itself. Instead use the meeting to understand and clarify issues. Once you understand a problem that needs to be solved, you can assign the people and resources and track the outcomes in future meetings.
• Include the right people – Make sure that you have the right number of people and the right people in your meetings. Be careful that you don’t fill up the room with a lot of people who don’t really need to be there.
• Select good meeting times – Try to have your meetings at times that have the least impact on the company and your customers. This way, meetings are not keeping people from actually doing work when they are likely the most productive or most likely to be servicing customers.

Every organization needs meetings to ensure the business will be successful. The mission should be accepting that meetings are necessary and learning how to make them positive and productive.

Source: PalletEnterprise