ICE comes out of AEI show with strong orders and great news on the company’s workforce.
Coming off our 7th trade show in the last 3 months, ICE is reporting a strong backorder across the extensive product range, but along with that some great news in terms of much improved lead times from the factory for customers globally. Joe Coppola, President of ICE was very enthused to be able to report, “our lead times are back to between 2 weeks to 6 weeks across all product lines and we’d like to take a moment to share with our valued customers what we attribute this to.”
The workforce at ICE is currently 240+ strong full time employees, plus an additional 25 contingent employees. Since the beginning of 2022 we have hired over 115 new employees and we continue to hire. Over the past few years, the work force has become very diverse. Currently 9 different languages are being spoken at ICE. To help with the language challenges, we currently have an ESL (English as a second language) class being taught on a weekly basis. Furthermore, the entire ICE workforce recently completed a Diversity & Inclusion class. ICE’s campus is 250,000 sq feet, with a separate shipping warehouse located right next to the main headquarters. And with the news of Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s cardiac incident hitting very close to home, ICE is pleased to announce that numerous employees just completed CPR/AED training as well.
Coppola said, “Our production lead times can be attributed to a growing work force that is committed to ICE’s core values: quality and craftsmanship. We greatly appreciate all of our customers’ patience in recent times and he added, “We have spent the last year intensely focused on training the 115 newly hired employees across 18 different product lines and 7 different departments. That training and our aggressive recruiting of new people is paying off and this is reflected in our new lead times.”
In addition to ICE’s game production improvements, the ICE Parts team, has also worked very hard to bring lead times down on spare parts orders and are thrilled to report approximate timing on parts orders: Consumables Orders (Balls, Bulbs, Hardware, ETC) – 2 to 3 days, Orders with Critical Assemblies – 2 Weeks, Orders with for Tech Room Boards – 3 Weeks. The Parts team also reported a monthly Parts sales record for January 2023. Coppola said, “this is a reflection of the great new people we have onboarded, the teamwork and synergy this department has created, and the many nights and weekends spent catching up to get our parts backorders shipped out!”
As we move forward, we feel we have learned a great deal about our business, and we continue to strive to improve in all areas. We’ve come a long way in the past year with the help and dedication of our employees. Finally, it’s also nice to report our development team has been busier than ever as we have gone to market with Dodgeball, Shipwreck, NHL Air FX and Harlem Globetrotters, while working on World Football Pro which will be available soon.
