YOU SHOULD KNOW

YOU SHOULD KNOW

David Lax

Premier president and his team make factory floors more intelligent

DAVID LAX AND HIS TEAM at Premier System Integrators spend plenty of time on factory floors without getting involved with their clients’ actual mechanical processes. Instead, the company’s mechanical and computer engineers design the systems that show what’s going on with those production lines. As Lax, Premier’s president since last year, sums up, the company makes factories manufacturing processes more productive and intelligent.

Premier’s ability to do that grew significantly earlier this year via the acquisition of Feed Forward, an Atlanta-area peer. That deal grew Premier’s workforce to 200 and added a Georgia office to go with locations in Middle Tennessee, Huntsville and Cincinnati. The company is on track to ring up $45 million in revenue this year.

Lax started at Premier 22 years ago as an engineer out of college and spent a decade with the company before heading to business school with an eye on returning to the finance and accounting side of the business. After earning an MBA from Middle Tennessee State University and a master’s in finance from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, one of his projects was to study liquidity scenarios options for the firm’s five founders, who had joined forces in 1991.

In 2014, that project began the process of turning Premier into a broadly-owned company via an employee stock ownership plan. That move, he says, has helped create a virtuous circle where Premier’s people are more invested in the company’s and clients’ successes and thus enable the company to better reward them.

Premier has grown into a regional player in part thanks to the convergence over time of interfaces linked to factory-floor technology and traditional IT systems helping drive broader business decisions such as inventory management. There’s much more ground to pave there, Lax says, because “everybody’s collecting data but there still aren’t many applications for it.”

Another emerging opportunity is cybersecurity. As plant floors and their components have become — like most other parts of our economy — connected to so many other things, they have become increasingly vulnerable to hacking. These considerations are especially important to infrastructure facilities, for instance.

‘Everybody’s collecting data but there still aren’t many applications for it.’

Premier’s top customer segments are food/ beverage and automotive while pulp/paper, specialty chemicals and consumer goods also are important industries. What many customers have in common, Lax says, is that they have in recent years become more hesitant to commit to big projects — particularly as the expansion of the 2010s became a record-breaker. Rather than involve Premier starting early in the planning process, Lax says a just-in-time approach has increasingly become the norm, meaning his team has to prove very quickly the value of its often intricate work when it does get called on.

“If you’re selling widgets, that’s one thing…,” he chuckles.

Teaming with Feed Forward should help with that over time, too. The company, Lax says, “looked a lot like us” and has added to the team numerous experienced people who will enable Premier to sharpen its training systems and broaden workers’ knowledge base. A recent reorganization of Premier’s engineering business unit — part of its 2019 strategic plan — included making members of its leadership team directly responsible for technical training and development.

“This will allow us to impose a greater degree of accountability and to create a more intentional plan to develop our engineering staŽ with less dependency on the traditional model of on-the-job training,” Lax says.