MES: A Business Built with Compassion and Perseverance

Headquartered in Ohio, MES started out as a home office and just one employee: Hiten Shah. As a sales representative, he had a stable job when the need to innovate and find his true calling arose. Within the next 10 years, he has established himself as a leading partner for both suppliers and his customers globally by embracing cost efficiency protocols without compromising on quality.

A tryst with fate

In August 2006, Shah visited India. When one of his friends told him about the need for metal casting molds. Shah helped them audit the suppliers extensively. After auditing a few of them, his friends looked for suppliers in China for the cost efficiency and the quality control was a better choice.

Shah recalls the experience. “Soon thereafter, I started calling nonautomotive customers, then, as luck would have it, I got the opportunity that I was looking for. Two or three different customers said that we don’t have a need for what you’re selling, but we have some need for metal castings. I knew good casting suppliers in India because I had audited those from my friend’s project in 2006. I put them in touch and there were a lot of cost savings. It just clicked quickly.”

Things picked up quickly from there on. “Essentially 2007 summer is when we started getting pieces of business. I stopped all the other commission work. I focused on just building the supply chain business. So, since 2010, for the last 10 years, this is all we’ve done.”

High Risk and Even Higher Rewards

There was a lot at stake and a lot to be done. Shah believes that he is a risk taker. Shah has a bagful of hits and a few misses. He gleefully acknowledges his failure wall. For him, challenges pose a wonderful opportunity to grow. Shah attributes his global expansion to his cooperative workforce and his ability to take risks.

Shah commemorates his first big move way back in 2013. “In 2013, we got an opportunity where some of our customers were moving their lines from Indiana and Atlanta to Mexico. We supported their move to Mexico. Now we have a global footprint. We have warehouses in the US, Mexico, China, and Poland. We are sourcing teams with fully developed supply chain quality sourcing in India, China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Mexico.”

“We grew with our customers,” says Shah. Customer centric expansion is MES’s key to their high risk, high reward attitude. When asked about the challenges he faced during the initial years, Shah reports, “We hired the wrong hydraulic engineers. We picked the wrong suppliers. We pursued wrong business opportunities. We didn’t do a good job monitoring the quality of our products. In some instances, we lost customers. One of our customers bypassed us and directly went to the suppliers. Another instance that stands out to me was when we picked the wrong warehouse partner. “This string of failures didn’t deter Shah from his vision. “Fortunately, there were two or three failures and there were two or three good successes. Maybe we made some mistakes, or we found a splendid opportunity either way.”

MES has grown by diversifying their supplier mix, sourcing developments. “Because of our global presence, we could bring our customers solutions from India, Vietnam and Mexico solutions very fast to help them move their supply chains and eliminate 90% of the tariff costs over the last few years.”

Leadership Style and The Pandemic

Shah’s leadership style is decisive. He lets his workforce take decisions and execute them. “Despite the pandemic, we have sent six shipments to China. We moved four shipments in India, during the first week of the lockdown. It happened because of a very engaged workforce. What we did through COVID was an impressive engagement within our teams. By allowing them to make a lot of decisions, sharing information on the priorities, and giving them the ability to make decisions.” He further adds, “Challenges distinguish us.”

When it comes down to leadership and management responsibilities, he believes in effective communication and a relentless willingness to learn and evolve. He has an inherent love for tools, processes and systems with metrics to help his organization and his team live up to their responsibilities. Digitization forms a strong pillar in mapping efficiency and tracking all the relevant metrics.

When asked about a few things he would want to do differently, he says that he would have thought about picking the right kind of people. He wanted to have a better sense of what type of talent he wanted to bring into his organization. “Five years back when we were building our sales team, we did a very poor job of picking the type of talent. We have to predict three years to learn that none of them were the right fit. Not because they were not good people, but they were just wrong for our business.” In addition, he would have tried to curb his appetite. Shah reports, “My team is saying that I have an appetite for risk, but I feel like I have not taken enough risks yet.“

With digitization, Shah has developed several tools at MES which his customers are constantly enquiring. Since MES is deeply rooted in customer satisfaction, Shah has made them available to his clients with his next big venture. “We are looking to spin off our technology into a software company, which I’m really excited about. A lot of customers have asked about buying, so that spinoff will be important.”

Besides the software company, Shah also wants to expand MES in the next five years in terms of the diversification of products and the customers they serve. “Keep doing what you’re doing. We are continuing to improve and change what’s needed and keep growing and having fun. I am doing this work which I love and hope to continue doing for a very long time”. MES’s future appears brighter than it’s incredible past and Shah is just focused on it. He adds “there is no Plan B”.

About Hiten Shah

In less than 15 years, Hiten Shah, the president and CEO of MES used international connections and technological advances to build a fast-growing supply chain business. In less than 10 years, he turned a one-man company from his home office to a global supply chain business in 5 different locations globally.

About MES Inc.

MES, Inc. is a full-service provider of global manufacturing and supply chain management services. The scope of our business is, literally, worldwide. We help our customers find the right overseas manufacturing sources for their products, working with highly qualified, ISO-certified suppliers from India, China, Australia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Then MES guides these parts to their final destination, managing each step in the supply chain process, including finishing and assembly operations leading to just-in-time delivery. MES maintains warehouse facilities in Ohio, California, Texas and Mexico. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, we also have offices in India (Mumbai), China (Ningbo and Shenzhen), Poland and Mexico.

Helping customers realize the benefits (and savings) of global manufacturing

We help many North American OEMs by managing the entire outsourced manufacturing process. Our mission is to deliver top-quality components in a timely and efficient manner, so we can reduce our customers’ overhead in as many areas as possible.

Our talented worldwide staff includes six sigma engineers, sourcing experts, quality inspectors and supply chain experts to maintain best-in-class metrics for the work we do.

MES operates on a simple, 3-part guiding philosophy:
• Create win-win solutions for our customers.
• Create a challenging & exciting work environment for our team.
• Develop quality suppliers across the globe.

MES, Inc. has been ISO 9001:2015 Certified since 2009.
Website: http://www.mesinc.net
Headquarters: Lewis Center, Ohio
Contact Number: 7402018112
Email address: [email protected]