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Kevin Bourquin, the Vice President of Operations at Cyber Graphics, is a highly motivated and dedicated servant leader with a proven track record in operations leadership, team building, strategic planning, and change management. With over 20 years of experience in the industry, Kevin has consistently demonstrated his capability to drive positive transformation, develop talent, and effectively manage projects by inspiring a clear vision and challenging existing processes.
In his current role at Cyber Graphics since June 2019, Kevin has played a pivotal role in the company’s success. He spearheaded due diligence, business strategy, and the implementation of four acquisitions, leading to substantial improvements in raw material cost savings, site consolidation, and overall business integrations, resulting in a 20% increase in profitability. Kevin’s strategic mindset also led to the design of a custom Management Information System (MIS) that streamlined order entry processes and enhanced production efficiency, ultimately accelerating speed to market for consumer product companies.
Prior to his role as Vice President, Kevin served as the Director of Operations and Prepress Manager at Cyber Graphics, showcasing his ability to manage strategic direction, implement effective operational budgets, and drive substantial improvements in quality and productivity. His extensive experience includes overseeing prepress technology, talent development, site integration, and the successful implementation of a data-driven quality program. Kevin’s leadership is marked by a commitment to fostering a positive and collaborative work environment, empowering diverse teams to achieve common goals through encouragement, coaching, and shared vision.
Cyber Graphics, an award-winning pre-media and media provider, is dedicated to serving your packaging needs with integrity and excellence. From concept to shelf, we pledge to eliminate the typical pains associated with print production for packaging graphics. Whether you’re a printer, converter, consumer product company, brand manager, or design agency, Cyber Graphics ensures a predictable, repeatable, and unbeatable experience, accelerating your time-to-market and allowing you to focus on building your business and bottom line.
Chris: I’m Chris Santomassimo, the host of the podcast. You can reach us at TheThinkFactory.com to talk about recording your own episode. Today I’m excited to introduce Kevin Bourquin, who’s with Cyber Graphics in Memphis, Tennessee. And Kevin is the VP of Operations at the company. So welcome to the podcast.
Kevin: Yeah, thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris: Appreciate it. So, Kevin, Cyber Graphics may not be a company that a lot of folks know, but I would love to learn a little bit about you and the company and the interesting work that you’re doing on the branding side and including on brand protection.
Kevin: So Cyber Graphics, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, operates five sites across the country, Nashville, Tennessee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Cleveland, Ohio. And Neenah, Wisconsin. And our focus is on protecting brands in the pre-media space. And so if you kind of look at our history, where we’ve come from, we were born out of a wide web packaging printer that wasn’t getting the service they needed from the industry and realized they had talent in their organization to generate the graphics and printing plates that they needed to serve that to serve that market space. So they spun us off as an independent company. Our family company is the corporation, Bryce Corporation. So anagram of Bryce is Cyber, so they operated as an independent company from the late eighties, and in the early nineties, they just spun us off to be completely independent company servicing them as well as giving us a mission to grow our business and help the industry outside of that. So we now service, you know, the first market offset market, digital groovier with high-quality separations that give brands and converters alone the ability to deliver what they need to deliver on the store shelf, which is predictable, consistent, high-quality, repeatable packaging.
Chris: Yeah. So when you talk about the food space in particular, you’ve got some pretty specific and detailed legal requirements in terms of what you got to have on the packaging and and how the graphics all works, but at the same time, balance the branding and yes to the customer, right?
Kevin: Exactly. And we work in a space where, you know, salty foods and snacks are big for us. Pet foods, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, candies, and confections. And all of those have a legal requirement from the FDA or the or the USDA on what they can say and how they say it. And we’re just looking in the packaging, and we deal with multinational global brands, but we also deal with some small mom-and-pop brands that are, you know, developing new products and innovating in the space. And so we have to have that knowledge base for raising those flags when we feel that the graphics and informational content doesn’t meet government standards, so they don’t get held liable for a recall or misleading the customer. And at the same time, we can balance that with the ultimate brand. Right. That’s the most important thing to track that customer’s attention on the store shelf or nowadays online. How do you take a package and make it perform in an online retail space, which is becoming an added service for what we do on a daily basis.
Chris: You know, and I think we take as consumers, we take packaging for granted sometimes because, when you buy a product, it’s the first thing that you discard. But it’s really got a major effect on product selection or consumer behavior. When it comes to selecting a product.
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