2015 Year in Review - Anthony Quaranta

What was your most notable project, deal, transaction or professional achievement in 2015? We helped develop and market an additional line of services for a manufacturing client that’s been in business since 1946. The product consists of a set of enhancement services that deliver added value to the capital equipment that their customers have invested in over the years. It’s no secret that capital equipment manufacturers have been experiencing some downturn during this tough economy. However, these enhancement services have been very successful because they yield more productivity on existing legacy machinery. Better still, perhaps, our target audience is the existing client base, which we all know often produces very lucrative new business opportunities. What real estate project, transaction, market trend or product had a significant impact on your industry in 2015? Q Group isn’t specifically involved in real estate transactions; however, we continue to witness that the market is getting stronger and stronger. In our particular case, we had to sell off a second building in 2015, and we did so in a very short period of time. How will you be supercharging your productivity in 2016? In 2016, we will continue to focus on sales and marketing automation by leveraging technology to not only stay more in touch with our clients, but also to help us manage, monitor, and measure sales activities which are so critical to our success. What emerging trends will drive investment and development in 2016? “Industry 4.0” will play an integral role. Basically, the term encompasses the next major upheaval in modern manufacturing, which is the digitization of the manufacturing sector. This disruption was preceded by (1) the lean manufacturing revolution in the 1970s, (2) outsourcing in the 1990s, and (3) automation in the 2000s. Many trends are driving Industry 4.0, including the incredible increase in data volumes, computation power and connectivity, and new forms of machine-human interaction such as touch-screen interfaces. And there’s little question that these trends are providing more and more companies with opportunities to achieve lights-out manufacturing, continuous productivity, and absolute quality.