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We align with our customers to make them more successful. —Bill Drazkowski Executive Vice President – National Accounts
Another longstanding strategy has been to invest aggressively in employee training through their corporate university, the Fastenal School of Business (FSB). Last year Fastenal employees on average received 16 hours of training from FSB, and overall there were more than 430,000 FSB course completions. This commitment to bringing out the potential of everybody in the organization is absolutely central to the organization’s success. Fastenal’s major growth drivers, including national accounts, vending, e-business, international expansion, construction, and its onsite service model, are all predicated on these foundational elements – a local presence at 3,000-plus in-market servicing locations, a captive distribution/logistics infrastructure, and above all, Fastenal’s talented people. Empowering People to Innovate Fastenal’s founder Bob Kierlin fostered a culture of decentralized decision-making and bottom-up innovation. His basic philosophy is that organizations succeed to the extent that they: April 2019|
Keep everyone within the organization focused on a common goal. Ÿ Bring out and use the creativity of all their members. Ÿ
Fastenal has been a proving ground for those beliefs. As the company has discovered, giving people the freedom to make local decisions can create some bumps in the road, but it unleashes incredible agility and dynamism. That’s really been the story of Fastenal – a company that’s gone from very humble beginnings to become a fast-growing $5-billion global organization. It’s not the products Fastenal provides. It’s not even how they distribute them. It’s that they’ve done a good job of not placing limits on people. Client Feedback “Being able to manage our supply chain in partnership with Fastenal has really enabled us to deliver quality at every single point along the job. It takes one more variable out of the equation.”-Adam Rhode, Vice President - Director, Operational Excellence and Engineering, Sellen Construction
“The services Fastenal provides allow us to reallocate our personnel so that we’re not focusing on the MRO [maintenance, repair, and operations] side – the shop supplies and the things that are not our core competency. They allow us to optimize all those resources so that we’re focusing on the things that make us money: getting parts out to our customers on time.”-Billie McMillian, Program Manager, Triumph Group, Hot Springs, AR “I would estimate our Fastenal vending solution increased production within the first month by 10 to 15 percent, driving our ultimate goal here, which is to get quality product out the door as fast as possible.”-Mike Mason, Purchasing Manager, Sundowner Trailers
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