Partnering with Pro-Pak Industries

Founded in Toledo in 1948, Pro-Pak Industries, a family-owned company, offers effective packaging solutions for a wide variety of clients, including a local manufacturer of solar panels. The company carefully designs and manufactures corrugated containers for use in transporting solar panels around the world.

Pro-Pak Industries partnered with Owens, along with consultants from Lean Systems, Inc., a locally-owned small business dedicated to business efficiency, to provide effective training solutions.

Owens assisted Pro-Pak Industries with obtaining a $156,000 State of Ohio Workforce Training Grant. The workforce education initiative led to training over 100 Pro-Pak Industries employees – starting with corporate management, progressing to department heads, then production supervisors, and most importantly production workers. All employees learned the keys to building a continuous improvement culture at the company and their own individual role in using available tools to make the company stronger.

"We are very customer driven," said Scott Armey, Human Resource Manager, Pro-Pak Industries. "In this business climate we wanted to reduce costs and share that with our customers."

Employees went through classroom training, on-the-job training and studied their workflow operations. Within six months, the area was evaluated, reconfigured and was up and running.

Pro-Pak Industries was able to take a two-shift operation with 15 people working five days a week down to a one-shift operation with four people working four days a week. This increase in efficiency ultimately saved the company $250,000 a year.

"We needed the training to have immediate impact and sustainability and build on continuous improvement. Kudos to Owens for helping us achieve that," said Armey.

With the success of this project, Owens helped to secure additional workforce training funds from the Ohio Development Services Agency to offer Pro-Pak Industries an extension for further training.

Pro-Pak Industries is a much stronger company positioned to be competitive and successful in the future.