For Andreas M. Schulze Ising, running a global company is both his biggest challenge and his biggest advantage. The president and CEO of Advanced Polymer Technology Corp. doesn’t get to work within the confines of one country operating in a certain way with a standard set of rules and regulations. However, he thrives on the ability to draw from different environments and points of view to advance the capabilities of the 200-employee global manufacturer of polyurethane-based materials, synthetic turf products and sports flooring applications.
The company has development teams around the world to aid in its global business, but keeping those teams in contact and working together is a constant, yet well worth it effort.
“When you’re just focused on one country, it’s an easier task because government and guidelines and the mentality of the folks in a certain country that you’ve experienced work in a certain way,” Ising says. “When you mix and match those and you work in the American industry and you have to incorporate the German way of thinking or the way things are handled in Australia or Hong Kong or China, then you really have an interesting task.”
Advanced Polymer Technology’s ability to pull from very different environments and perspectives allows the company to be an industry leader in innovation. It’s that ability that landed it the task of supplying surfaces to the Olympic authorities for the games in 2012.
Here’s how Ising keeps Advanced Polymer globally connected in order to develop innovative quality products.
Develop a global framework
Advanced Polymer manufactures and installs running tracks, tennis courts and artificial turf for rugby, football, soccer and many sports facilities and schools across the globe. The company has to be able to understand how business works in different parts of the world in order to succeed.
“It’s always a little bit of a struggle when you have locations, specifically production environments on a global basis,” Ising says. “You have to provide those folks with the right truths to make them understand how things work on a global basis. When you have brand names that you market globally, you have to make sure that you comply with the rules and regulations in a certain country but use those to excel the company and get everybody on the same boat to make sure things are going in the right direction.”
One of the key things to running a successful global business is to really provide people with a direction.
“You have to be able to see beyond the future and what the market requires,” he says. “How can the folks on hand and how can doing innovation fit into that picture and excel the company forward? Give them a straight line and the proper advice and have a plan for how the company can survive so people have a clear idea of what the next steps are. It’s very important to make sure that on the global level that this mission is clear across boundaries and clear across the country. It has to go beyond the local customs and how people think on a local basis. Because as a global company, it’s very important that the mission statement and the brand strategy is very clearly defined and can be grasped by everybody to make sure that it’s a team environment and teamwork that goes forward and extends in the right direction.”
To help Advanced Polymer keep tabs on how things are going in other countries and where each region can benefit from one another, Ising uses a global development team.
“We have a global development team of Ph.D. candidates … on hand in Europe and the states and Australia, and they create and test products to the market,” he says. “They have such an influence from the local markets and they understand the local requirements, so when you put all that together, you don’t just have the creativity of a specific area or a certain way of thinking whether it be German, Australian or Chinese, you actually cross the boundaries by having these guys talk together. It’s a very simple tool and it gives you a platform where ideas get brought to the table and discussed.”
If you operate on a global scale or even if you just operate in one country, you have to have a way for different regions to communicate and share ideas that can benefit the business.
“We look from three different directions from three different continents on similar products that we can enhance and modify based on local demands or local requirements,” he says. “As you can imagine they have very, very different conditions in Australia versus in Germany. In the United States, you have not just forest areas, you have deserts and extremely cold areas where the requirements for certain flooring products or sports flooring products are very different. There are different performance characteristics that are very dependent on the environment, temperature and light. Having the input from these different continents gives you quite an interesting mix of ideas and points of view and perspectives of what is right. The most important thing is to have an open mind and try to see things in a different global environment from that perspective.”
Innovate on ideas
Different perspectives are what allow you to develop ideas. You have to bring people in who actually look further beyond this perspective to help progress the company forward.
“In the end it’s all about innovating things,” Ising says. “It’s all about coming up with this new product. It’s always being a step beyond the competition. That’s probably one of the key focuses. We have a company that works in many different directions not just the sports flooring industry, but we make polymers for optical materials and you can imagine how extreme the bandwidth is between a simple tennis coating to something that will find it’s way into an optical application.”
While working on products for different industries creates challenges for the company, it also allows it to find innovations it otherwise wouldn’t find.
“For example, a running track that has up to 70 percent renewable resources,” he says. “With all these different technologies we have on hand in all these different areas, we have done a great job overlapping amongst those areas and coming up with a whole range of products.”
Whenever possible you have to allow your employees who operate in different areas of the company to interact so they can offer different perspectives and ideas and be challenged to innovate.
“You have to always be able to challenge somebody to step out of their own bubble and look at it from a customer basis, but also from a very fresh angle,” he says. “I think that’s also a key in our company since we have the global approach you always get all sorts of views out of very different perspectives. You have to make sure that you don’t get stuck with a certain way of looking at things. You always have to be able to challenge what you do and look at it from a different person’s perspective, a different market perspective, or a different requirements perspective because only then will you be able to overcome these problems and get this aha effect.”
You have to understand that when you’re looking at a problem for so long, it becomes the same old thing. Putting a different spin or twist on a situation can get you another step in the right direction.
“When you work within the sports environment you are always challenged,” Ising says. “You’re always challenged by the athletes, by the directors and the guys that actually use the products. There’s always an idea that comes from this market. On the other hand being so versatile and not being just a sports flooring business, but having a lot of high-tech applications like the optical industry, you challenge the standards that are not common in the sports flooring side or the industrial flooring side. You get a complete different set of requirements and you get a complete different set of eyes that look at things and can tell you how that is met. Then you have to have the ability to take those estranged views from a different environment into a more common environment and sometimes it has a very eye-opening effect.”
The biggest key for Ising and Advanced Polymer’s innovation comes from the fact that the global employees communicate in meetings, over the phone, and through e-mail platforms to provide different opinions from different environments that trigger the thought process and make products better.
“The key is you have to really challenge people,” he says. “You have to really everyday make sure that you ask the right questions, that you have people on your team that do the same thing, that really push that question and have good ideas and different perspectives on things so that you have a good discussion that will shed light from different angles on other things to do.”
Maintain a collaborative environment
In order to keep people in your company interacting with one another and sharing ideas, you have to make sure communication between them is easy.
“You have to always be able to communicate,” he says. “I have to communicate from my perspective to the communicators and I try to convey the message to them to do the same things within their teams — have an open mind, have an open ear, listen to people and really try to give good feedback and really try to question things in a positive way, in an upbeat and creative way.”
Advanced Polymer also uses a simple platform to communicate ideas to everybody within the corporation to get instant feedback.
“You come to work in the morning and you open up your e-mail and besides your normal e-mail, you have these little idea snippets, these little comments, these little challenges every day that people can take a look at and think about the day-to-day business, but again be challenged or poked to comment on these questions or ideas,” he says. “Everybody uses it in the company. Any request that goes into a development project is going to be put on that and discussed instantly.”
You don’t have to be on time for conference calls and forced to wait because not everyone is dialed in and you don’t have to fly anywhere to speak to someone.
“You get these things and you can respond very, very fast and it makes things so much easier because you really have an instant feedback and people can attach pictures and excel sheets and it’s out there for everybody,” he says. “To have a quick idea discussed amongst your peers that are involved in this is so much easier. It’s also kind of fun, because you don’t have to elaborate forever, you just put this out there and the idea is taken further by other colleagues in the organization.”
It is very beneficial to have ways for employees to share ideas amongst one another, but you also have to determine which ideas are the best.
“We have certain levels of R&D work that is basically on a more creative level that we discuss once a month in a management meeting where we look at these things and determine what has potential, what fits into our vision of the company, and what we can move forward,” Ising says. “Based on those decisions there is always something in there that we can take and actually incorporate into existing products or we go ahead and work it into new ideas and new products. It’s really a process of listening to the folks in your company. It’s a function of that and it’s a function of your market intelligence. What does the market tell you that you need? What are your potential possibilities within the company? It comes down to understanding what your company is able to do and reflecting that into the market environment.”
At the end of the day you have to have a passion for what you do and a drive to constantly do it better.
“That’s what sports are all about — being competitive and looking beyond your means and trying to exceed the next challenge and that’s what we do at our company very well,” he says. “It’s all about innovation and it’s about the people your company has and bringing that together.”
HOW TO REACH: Advanced Polymer Technology Corp., (724) 452-1330 or www.advpolytech.com
Takeaways
– Develop a global framework and mission that allows you to best utilize your team
– Get different perspectives to unlock hidden innovation
– Implement communication methods to maintain innovation and best practices
The Ising File
Born: Muenster, Germany
Education: Master’s degree in textile polymer chemistry from Bergische Universitat Wuppertal
What was your very first job?
I had many jobs during my childhood since my parents emphasized that life is not free. The one that stuck most with me was working as a delivery boy for medications in my mom’s pharmacy. We had to bike for miles to drop off prescriptions come rain or shine from 20 degrees to 110 degrees. Sometimes the work was more than one could endure. But what counts is getting the job done.
Who is someone you admire in business and why?
This would be my first boss. He touched me because of his vision and the ability to turn that into reality. He was probably the best listener and had that amazing ability to bring the right people together to achieve highest results.
What is your favorite country to do business in and why?
It is most certainly America. A country filled with people wanting to live the American Dream creates an environment of fast pace but also the desire to move ahead with business and life to create that amazing environment all Americans live in. Things happen in the U.S.; people try, try to excel in their own life/career and move others with them. The U.S. also provides a very pragmatic business environment that gives everybody the tools to become great entrepreneurs.
Do you have an APT product you are most proud of?
APT has worked for a very long time to be the industry leader in quality. Our product lines prove that. We have lately focused on environmental-friendly products within the polyester and polyurethane-based product families, utilizing many renewable resources in our formulations. Latest developments created a new generation of running track based on the legacy track, Rekortan, used in the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, called Rekortan G13 that is based on up to 70 percent renewable chemistry. It’s not only a track that runners will love for its accommodating features but will also provide a surface that will exceed the current requirements for sustainable and green building and construction codes.
