Built for the Customers Who Needed It Yesterday · John Abbot · Abbott Label

Ask John Abbott where Abbott Label will be in five years, and you probably won’t get a five-year plan.

That isn’t how he runs the company.

Markets change. Customers change. New opportunities appear. RFID wasn’t necessarily part of some perfectly mapped strategy years in advance, but today the business has grown so quickly that Abbott Label already needs additional equipment. Flexible packaging may be next.

For John, the ability to react is more important than pretending everything can be predicted.

Abbott Label operates five plants and sells exclusively for resale. The facilities share much of the same core capability, allowing the company to stay close to customers and move work where it makes the most sense.

And speed is a major part of the company’s identity.

While some larger suppliers may work with lead times measured in weeks, Abbott Label has built its business around customers who need something tomorrow — or preferably yesterday. Stock materials, ready-to-ship products, similar capabilities across plants, and a production culture focused on throughput allow Abbott Label to turn many jobs around in just three to five days.

That also makes software increasingly important.

With five facilities, production planning isn’t simply about optimizing one plant. Abbott Label needs visibility across the organization — and that is one of the reasons the company is moving forward with CERM.

But John is also very clear that implementing an MIS isn’t only a technology project.

It’s a people project.

Abbott Label has employees who have been with the company for more than 25 years. Introducing new processes means helping experienced people change familiar ways of working while bringing younger, digitally native employees into the same environment. The company has therefore spent considerable time preparing and educating its teams before the new system becomes part of everyday production.

And that perhaps says quite a lot about John Abbott himself.

He knows presses. He knows what they should sound like when they’re running properly. He knows what operators and equipment are capable of. But as Abbott Label has grown, his job has increasingly become less about operating machines and more about creating the environment where other people can succeed.

In this INKISH film, Morten B. Reitoft talks with John Abbott about family, leadership, five plants, RFID, flexible packaging, CERM, managing change, customer service, and why Abbott Label has built its business around one simple reality:

Customers rarely call because they need something in six weeks.

They call because they need it now.