BBI: Reinvesting To Better Serve Dealers, Customers
This article first appeared at BBI Spreader News, and it's a great piece from Lee Kilpatrick, the company's director of sales and marketing, that shows BBI's ongoing commitment to the nation's farmers.
BBI is a growing company. In fact, we’ve been growing each and every year for more than a decade.
This growth stems from two sources for which we are very grateful: a collaborative dealer network and the great customers we serve together. BBI continues to grow because of the way we respond to our market, which like any other market, demands that we deliver excellent products. And we can’t just deliver great farm equipment. We have to continuously redefine what our best efforts are in design, manufacturing, and quality assurance are, because today’s equipment can’t meet tomorrow’s needs.
Furthermore, we all know the implicit demands of today’s business world, no matter the market you serve: If you’re doing anything, you have to always look for ways to do it better and more efficiently.
In this spirit, BBI recently embarked on an ambitious project, what many around here in north Georgia think is our most ambitious endeavor yet. Our company president, Richard Hagler, had a vision for the people of BBI to design and build world-class equipment within the confines of a highly efficient manufacturing facility. Last year, we began this ambitious project, and now we stand proud of the results, because ultimately this work is all about improving our customer experience.
Our mission has always been simple in statement and difficult to achieve, demanding our best efforts at every turn. We must drive the economics of our customers; that is, we must deliver products that find new and refined ways to increase efficiency and promote a better bottom line for farmers worldwide.
As we focus on building dry-application spreaders, our manufacturing facility requires design and engineering investment to make our products more powerful and more consistent in achieving our mission. In the last year, we’ve doubled our capacity to manufacture spreaders in our Cornelia facility. Our trailer frame facility alone now has three times the capacity of its old home.
We have doubled our capacity through investments in sophisticated precision forming equipment, welding equipment and material handling equipment. This is in addition to continued utilization of precision laser and plasma burning and water jet technologies for precise fit and function. For a company known for the precision of its products, achieving new levels of quality in this area while increasing our ability to manufacture more equipment more quickly was simply a demand we had to meet.
Farming is in the middle of another generational change. This time, the integration of technology based on precision agriculture principles is driving that change. As farm operators continue to adapt to the changing times by adopting this technology, BBI must remain at the forefront, making equipment and electronics that will work hand-in-hand to offer our customers a faster, greater return on investment. This ROI will fuel each customer’s growth, as they take their farms to the next level of performance in the life cycle of their respective businesses.
As the younger generation of farmers leaves the world’s leading agriculture schools fully-primed to optimize their family farms for a future of sustained success, BBI will be there. To bring the best to the field, it all starts here, at what we can now call a world-class manufacturing operation that serves our customers.