Priority Architectural Graphics
Priority Architectural Graphics (PAG) is an Asian American woman-owned business. Founded in 1995 by owner Juliana Choy Sommer, PAG’s roots were in design and production of custom engraving for local businesses. PAG is now San Francisco’s leader in exterior and interior architectural signage and graphics.
Successfully Integrated, Increased Capacity & Sales
Client Business Need
After the success of the previous year’s process improvements with Manex, PAG purchased VKK, a competitor’s shop, doubling their manufacturing capacity. PAG was strategically integrating the two entities into a single company with the goal of building skills across the organization to enable capacity growth across sales, estimating, project management, operations, and installation.
Approach
Manex recommended a four-pronged approach to solve PAG’s integration challenges:
- Risk assessment of the existing manufacturing equipment and layout of PAG and VKK facilities to determine risks and solutions
- Utilize Manex’s expertise in manufacturing scaling and acquisition integration activities to identify and resolve risks in a more-timely fashion
- Kaizen methods training in Spanish for newly acquired staff
- An assessment of Corebridge to identify opportunities for improvement regarding the setup of product costing through proposal generation
Results Delivered
With Manex’s assistance, PAG was able to integrate the two businesses to work as one allowing PAG to quickly recoup costs.
Manex was able to extend PAG’s culture of using Kaizen methods for team problem solving to the newly acquired staff members.
As a result of the strategies implemented by Manex, PAG continues to align their goals to improve, grow, and support customers. With the fast integration of the two companies, PAG expects an increase in sales of $3,000,000 and retained sales of $5,000,000 in the coming year.
“We are a small business, and the acquisition of another small business needed to pay off quickly. There was a short window to get the two businesses integrated. With help from Manex, we were able to keep this period short, which allowed us to begin recouping costs quickly. The newly acquired staff did not have any previous Lean or Kaizen training and needed to be brought up to speed immediately. Manex was able to quickly and successfully extend our established culture of using Kaizen methods for team problem solving to the new team members.”
Juliana Choy Sommer, Priority Architectural Graphics President