Manufacturer’s Investment Generates Cost Savings and Increased Sales

BACKGROUND

Kearfott Corporation was founded in 1918 by William Dunham Kearfott. The Kearfott name has become synonymous with quality, reliability, and high technology on the cutting edge of science. Kearfott’s products guide spacecraft and strategic missiles, navigate autonomously undersea, provide navigation and fire control for ground vehicles, and control motion aboard both military and commercial aircraft among numerous other applications.

An international company with over 500,000 square feet in New Jersey, North Carolina and Mexico, where over 100,000 inertial systems, and over 4 million precision components and actuators have been produced. In New Jersey, Kearfott products include a complete line of guidance, navigation and pointing systems using both ring laser and tuned rotor gyroscopes. New Jersey operations also include complete manufacturing, test and product support capability for all of Kearfott’s inertial products and systems. In its North Carolina and Mexico operations, Kearfott designs, manufactures and supports gyro stabilized sights, electro-mechanical actuators, motion sensors and sensing systems, and electronic controllers.

Since 1988, Kearfott has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Astronautics Corporation of America (ACA) which is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

CHALLENGE

Like many companies, Kearfott outsourced the management of its website. And like most found the costs could be high and there was a time lag between a request and implementation. Rather than staying the course, Kearfott decided to bring management of the site in house.

SOLUTION

Gregory Ryan, Director of Integrated Operations explained, “Kearfott has a long history of working with NJMEP on projects ranging from a Lean Transformation, SCAMPI C and had recently completed training on Outlook. The training went very well resulting in maximizing our investment in the program. When we needed to improve the management our website that was built in WordPress we turned to NJMEP because of the previous successes we’ve had working with them.”
NJMEP brought in a WordPress expert to train select personnel in the program. With eight hours of training, participants learned:

• The difference between WordPress.com versus WordPress.org
• WordPress Themes
• Page management such as creating a Blog page to display posts, Creating generic pages – about  us, contact us, and deleting pages.
• How to create a Custom Menu, place pages in order and add sub pages
• Manage the Blog
• Add Widgets
• Manage Media Requirements, Plugins and Content

RESULTS

As reported in the NIST Survey, Kearfott achieved the following benefits:

• $500,000 increased sales
• $250,000 cost savings
• $50,000 investment in workforce training which included cost of the WordPress Specialist and the in house training costs.
• $100,000 investment in New Process and/or Product

NJMEP’s Main Service Areas:

• Business Development Services
• Contingency and Emergency Planning
• Destination Innovation
• Energy Alliance Program
• ExporTech™
• Human Resources Solutions
• Lean Business Solutions
• Quality Management Systems & ISO
• R&D Tax Credits
• Six Sigma
• Supply Chain, Transportation and Logistics Services

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