2019 All Star Team, Part One

Community Service Award

Winner: Natalie Lonergan, presented by Craig Parsons (President)

Natalie has truly thrown her heart & soul into the Boys & Girls Club over the last couple years. She became one of the founding members of the Associate Board last year and currently serves its Secretary. Over the last several months, she has helped with the development & implementation of many successful fundraisers including the Associate Board kick-off event, Hearts for Helping, a happy hour for the new Sun Prairie club (where she channeled her inner Tom Cruise as one of the bartenders, among other contributions), the Bike4BGC, and the Octopi Brewing anniversary fundraiser (in which she baked loads of delicious dog treats!!).

Natalie is making a huge difference in the lives of Dane County children! A quote from Alex Murray, Director of Events for the BGC, “Natalie is incredible! She is the type of person that you can always count on going above and beyond in everything she is involved in. Her positivity, leadership, and genuine personality is contagious and incredible to witness. BGCDC is fortunate to have her on the Associate Board, have her as an ambassador, and have her as a friend.”

A few words from Natalie: "Working at PJ has been the highlight of my career. I am truly grateful to work for such an amazing, caring, and supportive company. Not only does PJ care about me and all of the employees that work for them, they care about their community and give back more than any other company I have worked for. For a small company, we give more time and treasure than a lot of other larger companies and that is something I am very proud to be a part of."

Collaboration Award

Winner: Brad Adams, presented by Adam Becker (Director, Inside Sales)

New in 2019 is the Collaboration Award, which was put into place to recognize a member from our internal support teams including: Marketing, Accounting, HR, Warehousing, Product Support, Engineering and IT. These are the teams that help keep the PJ machine running smoothly every day and provide support to all across the organization.

The first ever Collaboration Award, as voted by their peers across the organization, will be awarded to Brad Adams! For those of you that have worked closely with Brad, this will come as no surprise as Brad helps lead our day to day warehousing efforts in Sun Prairie, WI master warehouse. For a distribution & service company, the warehouse plays a vital role in ensuring our customers and service centers alike, get the right parts, on time. Brad is the definition of dependable, friendly and knowledgeable & has more than earned the right to be recognized for this award. Clearly his peers across the company agree! Congratulations, Brad!

All In Award

Winner: Eric Ring, presented by Craig Swenson (COO)

It has been a crazy year with regards to inventory and warehousing at Palmer Johnson and Eric has been working hard to guide us through the process! For a while we could not get enough oilfield inventory in stock due to high demand and vendors missing delivery schedules, so Eric led us through a process to buy service parts that tried to account for ever-changing lead times. Then the oil industry declined and vendors suddenly shipped everything we had on order just as demand for the same parts dropped off. This took our inventory to an all time high and maxed out our central warehouse

That ramp up coincided with the purchase of Mill Log and the acquisition of $6.5 million in additional inventory (some of which was duplicate to what PJ already stocked). We then closed the Coburg, Oregon building and had to move all of the inventory from there into warehouses that were already full in Seattle and Sun Prairie. Eric lead this project and was onsite in Coburg and Seattle for several weeks while still overseeing the central warehouse in Sun Prairie. During one stretch of the integration of Mill Log, Eric worked 7 days a week for almost 4 weeks shipping inventory from Coburg and then working the weekend in Sun Prairie to get it put away.

Lastly, the influx of oilfield inventory along with the inventory acquired from Mill Log brought our inventory over $25 million and tied up way too much space and availability on our line of credit. In just 6 months since then, Eric has led a plan to bring inventory back to a reasonable level and already has it back under $20 million. But the most important trait of Eric’s is that he is always willing to help anyone who needs it. Whether it is staying late to get shipments out, answering questions on Production Orders, or coming back in after hours to ship something for our sales team; Eric can always be counted on to get the job done with professionalism and a positive attitude.

For his commitment to PJ and his sacrifice of a lot a time invested away from home as well as after hours, I am happy to present Eric Ring with the “All In” award for 2019! Congratulations Eric!