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January 2023 #15282 Page #60
A Vekta Trip Down Under By Aaron Bahner General Manager Vekta USA
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or anyone who’s ever wanted to take a trip Down Under, I have the perfect reason for you to go – visiting Vekta! December brought an exciting opportunity for me to make my first trip to visit the Vekta headquarters and factory in Perth, Australia. I started as the General Manager of Vekta USA back in January of 2020 but with the pandemic, closed borders, and a backlog of customer activities, I didn’t have the opportunity to travel halfway around the world until now. Although “working virtually” has become “normal” for so many of us, even when working in the same city or state, it’s still no substitute for in-person. I’ve had nearly two years of onboarding virtually, working with my management peers, engineering, and technical staff remotely, building business relations and social connections, but this was my chance for a true face-to-face. My excitement for the trip to Perth though was met with some hesitancy. I consider myself a fairly seasoned traveler, having been to Europe several times in my career, but something about this was very different…. Oh yeah, it is twice as far and requires a 16-hr flight! But it was worth it! Quickly after my arrival, I was greeted at the airport by Ed Serrano, Managing Director of Vekta, and shuttled off to my hotel to get caught up on some of the events for the weeks ahead. Thank goodness, because someone installed the steering wheel on the wrong side of his vehicle and I’m not sure how I would have handled that straight out of the airplane! (BTW, has anyone ever wondered why there isn’t an exam of some type before driving in another country? But I digress.) The timing of my trip worked out for several occasions. One of them was to mark the first anniversary of the new office and factory site in Perth. The new site is a testament to the growth of the company over the past years. This site is 4x larger than the previous site and the staffing levels have grown exponentially to keep up to the demands of the business. There are now dedicated areas to manufacture and assemble each of the product lines for Vekta that previously needed to be shared – which means they’ve removed our internal bottlenecks in the delivery of the larger systems that are becoming almost the standard for Vekta Automation systems. It was also very special to have the opportunity to attend the company Holiday party with all the local staff. Since the whole Vekta team has gotten so much larger, a venue outside of the office was needed and this year the party was held at Scitech, a local Continued next page
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