![]() With more sophisticated automation and technology, the physical work will shift from repetitive, tactical tasks to higher-value technical skills. “Given the dominance by Digi-Key in the labor pool up here, that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he added. “We will continue to grow our employee base, but that growth will happen at a slower rate than in the past as automation starts to augment some of the work,” Doherty said. Last year, the company added about 300 net-new hires to its workforce of 4,000 and more hires are expected in the next few years. Digi-Key’s workforce is growing fast too. Once all the state-of-the-art warehousing equipment and technology is installed, Doherty estimates the total usable space of the new facility will be 2.2 million square feet, nearly double what the company has now. “All our inventory spread over 135 miles will get consolidated back to Thief River Falls,” said Dave Doherty, Digi-Key’s president and chief operating officer.Ĭonstruction of the brand new one-million-square-foot structure that will become the future distribution center is complete, but Digi-Key needs the next two years to build out the interior. Each location today is about 600,000 square feet, for a total warehouse and office space capacity of 1.2 million square feet.īut that’s about to change as the company readies for a major expansion in its hometown scheduled to go online in June 2021. In recent years, Digi-Key has taken a piecemeal approach to managing growth by adding office and warehouse space in both Thief River Falls and Fargo, North Dakota, a two-hour drive from headquarters. The company’s biggest challenge today is to grow capacity to keep pace with demand while not compromising customer service. The company also posted a strong 36% topline growth rate in 2018, which was the second-highest growth rate among the top 50 distributors. In this year’s SourceToday ranking of the top 50 distributors, Digi-Key ranked fifth in revenue behind the four big broad-line distributors Arrow, Avnet, WPG Holdings and Future. The 48-year-old privately held “catalog” company that caters to small orders from engineers and developers has been a consistent high performer in the industry for many years as measured across a variety of metrics including revenue growth, customer service, product availability and speed of service. And employees help each other get their cars started at the end of the working day, regardless of their position on the org chart. In the wintertime, temperatures plunge below zero. Headquartered in Thief River Falls, population 8,600, located in northern Minnesota, the company is far from the hustle and bustle of urban life. It also has more than 500,000 customers worldwide and annual sales of more than $1.5 billion.Preparing for the Future: One on One with Dave Doherty, Digi-Key’s Chief Operating Officerĭigi-Key has always been a bit of an outlier in the electronics distribution lineup. The company employs 2,600 people and has hundreds of thousands of products in stock, including items such as USB flash drives and transistors. There are only so many folks (in Thief River Falls) to bring on as new team members, there's only so much space to occupy."ĭigi-Key was founded in the early 1970s in Thief River Falls by Ron Stordahl, who named the company for one of the products he sold early in his career, a digital electronic keyer kit for ham operators to use when sending code - a digi-key. ![]() "Eventually, where you are is going to be too small. "You've got this exponential growth," he said. The expansion is necessary, Sanchez said, because of Digi-Key's rapid growth. ![]() The company ships 300 to 500 orders a day from the Fargo site and hopes to boost that to nearly 2,000 orders. Now, Sanchez said, the company is looking to hire at least 25 more workers for the Fargo center. ![]() This July, the company hired seven people to fill orders at the warehouse. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |