Kimberly Eubank

Each new day offers a fresh set of challenges in the manufacturing industry. As for most businesses, manufacturers oversee their processes flow from end to end, from order-taking to building the product and shipping it. In addition to all of that – businesses need to ensure that their workforce is comfortable.

In any profession, when employees are working at a comfortable temperature, they are more productive. If staff are working in a factory that doesn't have air conditioning and it’s hotter inside the building than outdoors, they will get tired faster and be more prone to making mistakes. Comfort is key to employee retention, safety and morale.

Big Ass Fans manufactures industrial and residential fans, as well as infrared heaters and coolers. The team at the top ensures that the employee experience is comfortable, which in turn, makes the customer experience a seamless one. Big Ass Fans is transforming itself internally to scale to a billion-dollar business.

As its Chief Digital Information Officer, Kimberly Eubank was brought in to spearhead digital transformation efforts and allow for Big Ass Fans to gracefully scale to this goal. 

“We have been focused on tackling a lot of system improvements, from putting in a new integration layer so our systems properly talk to each other, to revamping our front-end tools to ensure that we have accurate data assurance,” she says. 

Cool manufacturing partnerships 

Big Ass Fans partnered with many specialty firms to provide expertise in key areas of their transformation.

One partner, Reaktor, was brought in to help overhaul their website design. 

“Reaktor comes with an exemplary pedigree of work on website experiences and technology. We were struggling with how best to marry our residential experience and our industrial experience online and making that seamless for our customers. Reaktor helped us think through that and implement the changes.”

In Spring 2024, Big Ass Fans will launch its new online experience, which is going to be familiar, yet refreshed.

Another of Big Ass Fans’ strategic partnerships is with CTSI Global, the vendor for its new transportation management system, Honeybee™. 

“A transportation management system is something that our operations facilities utilise to pick the best route at the best price, and then optimises that selection to ensure timely delivery for our customers,” she says. 

Through interfaces with CTSI, Big Ass Fans can better inform its customers in a more proactive way about where their shipment is along that path. 

“We are about halfway through the project. We expect to get a lot of efficiencies out of the new system as well as having a lot more visibility through the final leg of delivery for our customers. We are very excited to complete that project,” she says. 

Over the next 12 to 18 months, Big Ass Fans will be focused on completing a lot of its first tranche of work. But the busy season for fan purchases is fast approaching. 

“Our busy season, as you might imagine for fans, is in the summer,” she explains. “We have a lot of things that we're trying to get done before then.”

In the autumn, Big Ass Fans will begin to take its ERP to the cloud. 

“We're committed to not carrying over technical debt into the new architecture and to rethinking what's the right operational processes for how we do business in 2024 and beyond.”

Eubank is looking forward to evolving the current ERP into the cloud with new, cleaner, more streamlined and automated work processes, so we can keep building fans that keep our customers comfortable, without compromise.

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