Turning ordinary houses into extraordinary homes, all while employing safety, superior quality, timely delivery, and individualized customer service, is at the heart of every project by Great Northern Cabinetry (GNC), a manufacturer committed to offering clients the best since 1972. With a wide range of goods and delivering excellent value, service, and selection, GNC not only provides high-quality craftsmanship but also guarantees environmental sustainability via the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers of America’s (KCMA) ESP Certification.
Throughout its 50-plus years in business, Great Northern Cabinetry has worked with leading kitchen designers to offer an extensive product line with numerous personalized options and attention to detail that is second to none. Working with an array of premium materials, the company creates one-of-a-kind cabinets tailored to each client’s needs and tastes.
Now, after successfully weathering a particularly challenging year, GNC has emerged ready for the year ahead and many more to come. “The reality is the cabinet industry has gone through a tremendous amount of turmoil in the last six months, given all of the challenges around housing and housing-related products and categories,” says owner Tim Ford. “There have been several significant cabinet companies that have folded their tent and closed up shop, but we’re still here, fighting and managing through it.”
Despite these extraordinary challenges, Ford considers present success in three ways: one, how is GNC performing commercially; second, how is it performing operationally; and third, how is it performing financially?
“Commercially, a year ago, we had a limited sales force,” he says. “Our sales manager had retired, we had a new sales leader, and over the past year, we’ve almost completely changed out our sales team, bringing on new sales reps who are very deeply ingrained in the industry.”
This means well-connected reps who have a deep network of customers that they’ve worked with previously. “From a commercial perspective, we’re in a really good place to grow our business, and in fact, we’re starting to see the fruits of that,” Ford shares. “In the fourth quarter alone, we had several dozen new dealers sign up and join our dealer network, and we’re beginning to see that turn into new business.”
Knowing you’re starting the new year with a “bit more wind in your sails” than a year ago when the future looked unclear feels good, he adds. “The tale of last year was that it started with a great deal of enthusiasm, but the uncertainty regarding tariffs and other related activities caused a degree of question and concern, and then people pulled back. But as interest rates have started to come down and things are starting to thaw a bit, it’s starting to feel similar to the start of last year from an enthusiasm standpoint.”
As GNC anticipates significant growth in 2026, a material delivery system implemented last year will enable the company to more efficiently manage material flow, material consumption, and inventory. With sales expected to grow more than 20 percent, inventory should increase less quickly and doesn’t need to grow at the same rate as sales, Ford explains. “We feel really good about the kind of activities we’ve undertaken in the processes we’ve put in place over the past 15 to 18 months to make sure that as the business grows, we can leverage that base level of inventory that any business has to carry,” he adds.
While the total amount of raw material on hand isn’t significantly different than before implementing the new system, the ability to leverage what GNC does have is completely different than what it was a year and a half ago. A critical part of the new system is the company’s implementation of its material planning process, called “Plan for Every Part,” or PFEP.
“It sounds simple, but in my experience, most manufacturing businesses don’t have a plan for every part they use,” says Ford. “We’ve implemented this SKU-by-SKU plan, which includes a minimum inventory level, the average daily consumption during a planning period, lead times and replenishment cycles from each vendor, and so on.”
The PFEP and material system have brought a fundamental change to the way GNC manages inventory and delivers materials. Like most companies, GNC would previously order material, and if three departments use the same material, it would be split up, with each receiving one-third of the lot; one department would inevitably run out. This would lead to needing more material and putting in an order for more while the other two departments still had plenty.
In addition to the PFEP, the company now employs a supermarket concept, with raw material centrally housed in one location and delivered to the team members as needed, rather than being spread out throughout the plant. “We’d end up with more in aggregate, so what we’ve done is pull it all back,” Ford explains. “Instead of having that material in three locations, it’s now housed in one central location, and we deliver it to the operator. That puts much more control in our hands,” he says.
“We’ve created what I would characterize as a surgeon/nurse concept where the surgeons are our operators, and the nurse is our material delivery system that brings enough material to each operator for them to work productively for the next two hours. They are replenished at the right time with the right quantity of material,” says Ford. “This system allows us to manage material flow and inventory much more deeply and closely. While we have a minimum level of raw material we have to carry, we are much more dialed in on how much we actually need to have on hand. As we grow the business, the amount we need to carry will go up at a much slower rate than sales will.”
One side effect of this change is improved employee satisfaction and morale thanks to a smoother process. “It’s not just the inventory level that matters; it’s the overall productivity in the plant and employee satisfaction, which are a little bit less obvious in terms of numbers, and a little bit harder to measure, but very clearly, those have a big impact on what we’re doing.”
Company morale is a matter GNC takes to heart, even when it comes to the sometimes necessary business of reducing employee hours during downtimes. “Like a lot of companies, last fall we had to cut back hours, so people who were working 40-plus hours a week were working less than 40 hours a week over the last three to five months of the year, because demand was down,” says Ford. While normally that would create a great deal of anxiety and trepidation, GNC was transparent with its workforce about what it was doing and asked for management hours to be cut back as well. “We didn’t need to do that financially, necessarily, but it was the right message to send to the hourly folks that we’re all in this together.”
The show of solidarity was greatly appreciated, he adds. “We’re trying to create a culture of teamwork, one where we win together and we lose together. It’s been that kind of behavior that has been particularly well received.” Now, when management needs to make changes and implement new processes, there’s a level of trust that has been built with the understanding that everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Ford’s commitment to GNC’s culture and future success means always trying to look forward, he stresses. “I’m the eternal optimist,” he says. “In some ways, you’ve got to be a realist in the moment, but you want to have optimism as well. As I think about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going, I’ve been in the business for five years, and I feel like I’m just now getting to the starting line.”
For his first couple of years, there was a “wild swing” of demand that went through the roof, he says. Material costs were tremendously high, and the industry saw a pullback in the last couple of years. Ford learned a lot in the initial phase, particularly when there was a rapid ramp-up of demand in 2021 and 2022. “Had we not experienced that significant increase in demand during that time, I might not have fully appreciated how much work needed to be done to be able to set the company up for growth,” Ford says. GNC has worked very hard over the past three years to build scalability into its operations so that when growth comes, the company is prepared for it. And in fact, GNC is in a much better position today to handle growth than it was during the past five years.
“What gives me optimism is the fact that we’ve done that hard work,” Ford says. “We’re still here fighting the fight, and we’ve got all of these opportunities to prove our capability with the revitalized sales force and the new dealers we’re bringing on. I’m optimistic about 2026 and where I think things will go, and all we need is a little wind in our sails—not a gale force wind, but a little bit of wind in our sails—and we’ll be in a good place for this year.”
