Welcome New Comers!

Jane Callison

President of ididit

WOW, my first blog. This is a big technological step for me, not that I am computer challenged, but I never want to lose the human contact in our business. I believe that computers are important for sales staff and accounting staff and inventory control. Our business needs to be run by a human being that listens to the customer. The goal of this blog is exchange ideas, initiate new products and improve existing products. We can exchange ideas about the growth of the industry and trends that we see. How you, and our business will be affected by them.

Occasionally, I will have Ken, CEO and the chief designer, or Scott who does the production launch of new products, or Kimberly, my right hand; help to address an issue that you may bring up. Together we will address all serious inquires you may have. We will also address some fun things. We hear some funny stories on the phone we may pass along. We may talk about the last car show we attended. I hope we will always have a sense of humor!

MADE IN THE USA . My first topic will be “Made in the USA”. As you may know, we are located in Michigan the”Motor City Capital”. We have always been proud of that fact. More than half of my neighborhood is directly or indirectly employed by the motor companies. We are all aware that only a part of the vehicle is required to be built here in the US to make the claim that it is American made. Ken has watched the jobs at the Saline, Michigan Ford Plant leave the US before he retired from there. He has always been a proponent of keeping ALL the monies within the US borders.

Two years ago, ididit began investigating the possibilities of each part being made on our own soil. We had to discover sources for each of the more than 50 internal parts of our steering column. When we found these sources, often we found that our production numbers were too high, or too low, for their production to be practical. Ken and Scott were constantly checking new companies for each part. We found manufacturers that would produce the part at a price we were happy with, but would not have on time delivery. Also, this is a very important detail. Imagine the stress around here!

We have finally finished the last two parts in-house. If you have ordered from us, you know it is the column shift steering columns. We ordered a machine, which arrived (prepaid). It did not work! Engineers came to show us how to produce the part. The first time they turned it on, they broke the tooling! (Better them than us!) As I write, we are catching up on all the back orders and intend to have columns on the shelf in the near future. Our goal is to ship from inventory. We did that two years ago and we are close to doing that again!

Another reason we are proud to say “ididit” in the USA.