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Meet Manuel Pachano of nuVector in Northwest

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Manuel Pachano.

Manuel, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
nuVector is the culmination of many years of design, development and deployment of software solutions in the area of industrial reusable packaging. The company has its roots in the world of supply chain management and optimization software solutions. nuVector was founded in 2012 and since then it has been focused on providing commercial software solutions to a variety of industries as well as designing, developing and deploying tailor-made software solutions for companies.

nuVector started out working very closely with a company called packIQ that specializes in providing industrial packaging solutions to a wide range of industries. While packIQ handled the physical packaging operations, nuVector focused on providing visibility and management software solutions that would equip packIQ’s customers with the right tools to get a better handle on the location and utilization of their packaging. During this time, nuVector capitalized on its software development capabilities to offer tailor-made solutions built to solve unique obstacles that generic commercial software solutions were not capable of addressing.

As our understanding of the reusable packaging industry expanded, thanks in large part to our daily client interaction, we took notice of new opportunities that inspired the development of a new class of products that would support this niche industry. Owing to our intense research and adaptation processes, we find ourselves in the extraordinary position of being able to focus 100% of our efforts and resources towards the solutions deemed most valuable by our clients; and we are by no means done yet – we see this as a journey not just as a destination, which keeps us sharp every step of the way.

Has it been a smooth road?
We consider ourselves very lucky to have always maintained excellent long-term relationships with all of our clients. This has made it relatively easy for us to succeed. However, as a boutique software development and distribution firm, we have limited resources to promote our business. To date, we have been largely dependent on the quality of our reputation and our clients’ word of mouth endorsements. Getting the word out there about what we can do for our clients has not been easy. We have a small marketing team that is focused on promoting our services and solutions to the world but spreading the word to the extent we envisioned has proven to be a difficult task.

Beyond our limited promoting capabilities, finding the right team members brings its own set of issues. We have very strict requirements about the quality of people we bring onto our team. They must be innovative, independent, reliable and most importantly, share our passion for exceptional customer service. As you can imagine, these qualities are hard to come by, not to mention the training time and effort necessary for new members to achieve our working standards before they can be deemed ready to serve our clients. Thankfully, when we do find that person with the magic “stuff”, they tend to continue as part of the team for a very long time. In fact, our yearly turnover ratio is almost 0 – a stat that makes me very proud.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the nuVector story. Tell us more about the business.
nuVector is a technology solutions provider that focuses on developing turn-key solutions and custom-designed software for its clients. nuVector offers two commercial applications: LoopManager™ and the JobShopApp™. Let’s start with LoopManager™: here we have created a turn-key reusable packaging management software solution to provide complete visibility into the supply and demand chains of industrial returnable packaging. JobShopApp™, on the other hand, is a job-shop order tracking system that provides full visibility to the maintenance and repair processes associated with industrial equipment; from quoting and processing all the way down to shipping and invoicing.

nuVector also specializes in developing tailor-made software solutions for companies that require customized applications to exactly fit their particular business requirements. In this capacity, nuVector can act as a company’s internal IT department, integrating itself into the business and providing unique solutions to match the company’s needs.

Thanks to the abundance of capabilities within nuVector, we are able to work alongside a wide spectrum of industries including the automotive, environmental processing and media broadcasting services, amongst others. Although we consider ourselves to be a boutique firm, we are very proud to support a client base comprised of very large (fortune 500) companies as well as medium-sized enterprises. Our clients are our family and we cherish the opportunity to serve them with innovative, functional solutions.

Of everything that we have done with nuVector, the one milestone of which I am the proudest is the reputation that we have managed to build with our clients. We consistently receive excellent reviews on our annual client feedback. This standard of excellence is surely met thanks to the unwavering effort put out by the nuVector team. Personally, I get a great sense of reward when I see that our clients appreciate the work we do for them.

Internally, we have a set of core values go into every decision we make:

• Integrity
• Honesty
• Commitment to our clients
• Build quality and reliability
• Team Work
• Innovation
• Effective Communication
• Enthusiasm
• Passion

These are not just words to us. We truly believe these to be our guiding principles. From the beginning, we understood that if we took these principles into consideration at every junction, the results would speak for themselves – this has proven to be true.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
That is hard to predict with any level of certainty. To give you an example, about 15 years or so ago, the Department of Defense (DoD) and Walmart started a new initiative where they would heavily encourage all of their suppliers to adopt the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to track the inventory and movement of supplies coming into their distribution systems. This ignited a huge effort within the reusable packaging industry and the consensus was that, within 5-10 years, all aspects of the supply chain would be tracked using RFID technology – this would have come to create immense value for all parties involved in the supply chain model, from both an economic as well as safety stand-point. Unfortunately, although many companies have implemented some form of RFID tracking systems, the fact is that it has not panned out to be the largely adopted approach that was originally envisioned. The hype was very big, but the harsh reality of implementation issues were not properly foreseen.

Having said that, I believe that the need for better visibility within the industrial reusable packaging industry is very real and that companies (large and small) are looking for solutions to help them achieve that objective. I have observed that the typical user of industrial reusable packaging still works with antiquated manual processes to manage their packaging fleets. It is common for people to use single-user applications such as Excel, PowerPoint or Word documents to manage their reusable assets, creating islands of information and not considering that this is in essence a distributed problem. Users try to circumvent this issue by “emailing” across their isolated single-user documents. However, due to the distributed nature of this environment, I believe the industry will (and is being forced to) bring about a higher level of real-time visibility via technological solutions to their operations. In my opinion, this course of action is inevitable if companies are to squeeze the maximum value and utilization out of their reusable packaging fleets.

The impact that reusable packaging can create within production environments is enormous. For example, it is not uncommon for automotive companies to charge their suppliers tens of thousands of dollars for every minute that a production line is held up due to a lack of supply parts. Most of the supply parts coming into a large automotive manufacturing/assembly plant are transported using reusable packaging (containers, bins, racks, etc). if a unit of specialized reusable packaging were not available to move that auto part, the potential cost to the supplier would be tremendous. So, the problem is not the cost associated with the reusable packaging itself; it is the implications that come with not having the reusable package available to transport the necessary supply part. This fact alone is forcing companies to implement better tools to assist in the management and visibility of their reusable packaging fleets.

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