Jack Donnell is president and CEO of Prime360®, a national pallet service and management company headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois.
Pallet Enterprise: Your company recently rebranded as Prime360® (formerly Northwest Pallet Services and Prime Woodcraft, Inc.). Please explain your new brand messaging concept.
Donnell: Prime360 captures nearly every facet of our new organization in one word. Prime conveys first and best — emphasizing our commitment to put our customers first and delivering the best services to them. And 360 represents how we help our customers in a circular economy. It’s a means of how we can leverage our resources to give customers full visibility into their supply chain processes, identify key issues quickly, and realign their strategies as needed to best optimize their operations and financial performance. Our philosophy is to work hand-in-hand directly with our customers and as an extension of their team whenever needed. That completes our “360” circle vision.
Pallet Enterprise: Data is a big part of your strategy moving forward. How are you trying to take your tracking and reporting capabilities to the next level?
Donnell: As you know, the pallet supply chain management structure has a lot of moving parts which can often make tracking, supply, and materials validation, counts, etc. very difficult to capture. There is also a lot of manual documentation involved which can open you up to errors and easily lose critical data. That’s creating a tremendous burden on this industry. Yes, technology also is the key for accuracy, efficiency, optimization, and financial management.
Given that, our team moved quickly to find a solution. We looked at going with off-the-shelf technology, but with customer insights and our team members’ industry expertise, we knew the product didn’t exist. We had to create something from the ground up and tailored specifically to pallet supply chain needs. PrimeVision® is that. It’s a proprietary, cloud-based technology that’s unlike anything else in the industry.
It’s designed with customer-defined, pallet supply chain feature functionality that can be customized to help them monitor their pallet supply chain holistically. In addition to having access to real-time data and updates, it even includes video and photographs to capture and maintain in their solutions to help improve their pallet tracking, process management, and accountability.
After defining each customer’s preferred PrimeVision structure, we design reports and dashboards for them to use with operational performance and drill-down assessments on details including order status tracking by location, date, and type of pallet.
Pallet Enterprise: How has your merger with Prime Woodcraft gone?
Donnell: It began as a great partnering, and by combining our collective expertise, networks, and services – it is grown into one great team. I think a big part of that success in less than a year was likely due to a common mindsight and determination we shared to create something unique and offer more to our customers than ever before. But in fairness to all of our employees, customers, and partners, we needed to simplify who we are as a company – organizationally and culturally. We have that now. With the rebrand launch, the response from everyone – internal and external – has been overwhelmingly positive. While change is usually difficult in any business, things are going well, and it was the right change at the right time for us.
Pallet Enterprise: What is the best piece of business advice you ever received?
Donnell: Keep your customers and employees at the heart of every decision you make.
