Michael Harlow, Vice President / Sales, Kodiak Assembly Solutions LLLP

Has inflation or higher interest rates caused a slowdown in 2023, and are you expecting a rebound in business in 2024?
It depends on the nature of the customer. For established organizations that need capital, they will typically move forward, and buy regardless of rate environment.

For small or start-up organizations (with external lease requirements) they have been impacted and ask for extended payment terms. Flexibility from suppliers such as us is key.

Will you be launching new products or services in 2024?
We will. The Alternative Energy fields (automotive, solar etc.) are blossoming with new ideas and products and are still in a growth stage.

Have supply chain shortages caused problems, if so, what has your team done to reduce issues for 2024?
We have spoken with customers that now have the inverse problem of too much inventory and are trying to deplete stockpiles accumulated as an overreaction to the supply shortage issue.

With hiring remaining a challenge, what can the industry do to help develop skilled workers?
From the US perspective, this is probably the single largest challenge facing most employers today, and into the foreseeable future.

This challenge has no easy solution and contrary to what many small business owners thought (that the shortage was temporary due to the post-COVID effect) the problem stems from somewhere much deeper than a by-product from COVID. COVID was a catalyst for a problem that was already brewing for decades. Simply put, the demographics of new employees to replace older employees retiring at a rate of 10K+ per day (for years to come) is not a favorable position for employer worker demand.

In the US, outside of foreign labor immigration law changes, the demographics are not very favorable for skilled workforce pools. In addition, employees suddenly have more leverage than employers and hence a tidal shift is ensuing that will eventually work itself out. As an automation solutions provider, this work in our favor as automating laborious tasks helps companies’ buffer some of these labor pool availability peaks and valleys.