KMC Controls Celebrates Employee’s 52 Year Career
KMC Controls®, an industry leader in building automation, is at once delighted and saddened to announce the retirement of Chris Kreuter, an innovator whose career spanned more than 50 years with the company.
Chris' career started 52 years ago when his father, Ken Kreuter, founded Kreuter Manufacturing - today called KMC Controls.
In the late-1960s Ken realized an opportunity to form his own company. "My dad wanted to design a line of controls of our own," explained Chris, "and that's what we started doing. We built molds and dies to make our own parts and our own controls."
At the company's inception, Chris worked in partnership with his father, two of his brothers, and future brother-in-law. "I was making parts on a lathe and also on a punch press when I was a teenager," recalled Chris, three of whose brothers continue to work at KMC. Together, along with other family members lending a hand when and where needed, they fashioned parts and equipment to Ken's designs in a three-car garage. "We used to work 12, 14 hours a day if we had to."
In the mid-1970s, the young company relocated from Winnipeg, Canada to Thief River Falls, Minnesota. By the 1980s, manufacturing split off and moved to a site in New Paris, Indiana. By the close of the decade, the company had consolidated its engineering and manufacturing operations to its expanded facility in New Paris.
As the business grew, so did the scope of Chris's roles at the company. "I started doing some of the tool design in the '80s," he said, "and I was doing some of the product design in the '90s."
A small sampling of HVAC hardware he helped develop include wall-mounted sensors, the proprietary line of KMDigital controllers, the Conquest series of BACnet controllers, and the Company's new Indoor Air Quality line of controllers and measuring devices, not to mention a system for coupling an actuator to a valve or damper, for which he holds a patent.
In his more than five decades in the business, Chris has witnessed firsthand sweeping changes in technology and how it is applied to facility controls. "We went from pneumatics [controls that use compressed air as the signaling medium] to computer electronics on all aspects of a building," he said. "That was the biggest change I've seen."
In that same time span, KMC Controls has managed to grow while remaining true to its origins as a family-owned business committed to innovation and to the success of its customers.
Today, the original machine shop has given way to a state-of-the-art tool and die facility under the same roof as the engineering department and factory floor. Having all those capabilities in house remains one reason the company can take a concept from drawing to working prototype in a fraction of the time it takes other manufacturers in the controls industry.
Looking ahead, Chris said he looks forward to having more time for his hobbies. "I'll probably do a lot more hunting and fishing," he said. A pilot who has logged more than 4,000 hours in the air, he is also an avid vintage motorcycle collector.
Looking back, said Chris said he enjoys the friendships he's made at KMC. "Good folks here," he said. And he plans to check in on them at KMC from time to time. After all, it's another opportunity take one of his 1930s- and 1940s-era Harley Davidson cruisers out for a ride.
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Media Contact: Jason Mills, (574) 831-8196
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Original Source: KMC Controls Celebrates Employee's 52 Year Career
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Desygner Launches ‘Workation’ With Global Hackathon in Bali to Spark Innovation
GOLD COAST, Australia - October 27, 2022 - (Newswire.com)
Imagine a world where a company books an amazing destination for their employees and pays to experience life as a digital nomad in Bali. At Desygner - a fast-growing martech solution - this is a way of work-life - distinct from the usual company offsite. With its digital workforce of over 100+ employees spread across the world, Desygner seeks to set a new status quo for innovation and talent acquisition by organising a series of company-sponsored "workations" in the most sought destinations around the world for digital nomads.
The Australian company today announced a 12-day global hackathon set to go live on the 31st of October 2022 until the 11th of November 2022 at Canggu in Bali, which is open for digital nomads and outstanding students in addition to the global Desygner Team, who are already heading towards their dream destination.
The hackathon is all-inclusive of accommodation, meals and entertainment provided to all participants. The event is an opportunity for talented Developers, DevOps, QA professionals, marketers, designers and sales professionals to work with the Desygner team and get hired for open positions in Bali, London, and the company HQ in Gold Coast, Australia (sponsoring remote applicants).
The main objective of the initiative is to benchmark Desygner as a brand that attracts the best talent around the world and to bring innovation to remote working, steering away from the traditional notion of work being physically tied to offices or company headquarters. The company, which is growing at a fast pace, believes that the right mix of work and play can spark innovation for creating "the awesome factor", which is a thriving culture at Desygner.
Post-pandemic, as most organisations are experimenting with hybrid and remote working models, Desygner stands to lead by example in creating better work-life experiences to attract and retain talented staff to tackle global talent crisis as they grow.
Spearheading the workation, CEO of Desygner, Alex Rich, who envisions exceptional work culture for his staff by creating unique working environments a couple of times a year in beautiful locations worldwide said, "Instead of just investing in traditional startup slacks and ping-pong tables in the office, we are going one step further and investing in places people want to work from, in dream locations".
"When you have a software company like Desygner with over 3 million lines of code and 30+ million users, you tend to focus on the bigger strategic projects, and smaller projects get missed. Therefore, the hackathon strategy pushes us to be more innovative than the larger companies to excel," he says.
Speaking about the idea of a hackathon in Bali, Daniel de Byl, who is a QA Automation Developer at Desygner, said, "I love working at the office, but the workation in Bali is next level. I am super excited to be part of an event like this and work with colleagues from around the world face-to-face. It's an experience to treasure for a lifetime."
Interested participants can email their CV to [email protected].
Contact Information:
Rajeshwari Channakrishna
PR & Communication
[email protected]
+44 7440720172
Press Release Service by Newswire.com
Original Source: Desygner Launches 'Workation' With Global Hackathon in Bali to Spark Innovation
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