Insider Only Techopia

Dallas-area office gives Kinaxis its ‘first true presence’ in U.S.

February 1, 2024

Already an Insider? Log in

Get Instant Access to This Article

Become an Ottawa Business Journal Insider and get immediate access to all of our Insider-only content and much more.

When Megan Paterson assumed the newly created role of chief operating officer at software powerhouse Kinaxis last summer, expanding the Kanata-based firm’s real estate footprint was among her top priorities. True to Paterson’s word, Kinaxis this week opened its first permanent office in the United States – a 5,300-square-foot space in Las Colinas, a planned community in suburban Dallas. The new office “will serve as a centralized hub where employees and customers can come together to engage, collaborate and work towards solving some of the most pressing challenges facing global supply chains,” the company said in a news release. The opening of the new U.S. location caps a global expansion drive that’s seen Kinaxis establish a physical presence in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, India, Singapore and Japan over the past few years as demand for its supply-chain management software has soared. The firm’s worldwide headcount has more than doubled from roughly 800 in early 2020 to nearly 2,000 today. But onboarding hundreds of employees amid the COVID-19 crisis presented special challenges for Kinaxis – and especially for Paterson, who spent five years as the company’s chief human resources officer before changing C-suite seats six months ago. Many of those new hires “didn’t get a chance to meet each other,” Paterson told Techopia this week. “(In-person interaction) does give you that extra engagement. You build relationships faster.” Some of America’s biggest corporations – including Ford, General Motors and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin – use Kinaxis’s flagship Rapid Response platform to help them quickly analyze how variables such as changes in the price and availability of parts and other materials will affect everything from production schedules to profit margins. Yet, until last Monday, the Kanata firm’s main U.S. address was a UPS store in Chicago. Now, the company finally has a genuine brick-and-mortar hub in one of its most important international markets, in an urban area where Lockheed Martin as well as several major customers in the oil and gas and manufacturing sectors have significant operations. “We’ve been in the U.S. for years and years, but we’ve never had a physical location,” Paterson explained. “This is our first true presence in the U.S. As we expand, it’s really important for us to have a physical location there.”

Supply-chain software hub

The Texas metropolis is also something of a supply-chain software hotbed, she noted. For example, one of the rapidly growing industry’s brightest stars is o9 Solutions, a Dallas-based firm that was valued at US$2.7 billion in a recent funding round and reported year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth of more than 80 per cent in 2022. “There’s a lot of supply-chain talent in the area,” explained Paterson, noting that a significant chunk of Kinaxis’s roughly 275 U.S. employees call the Dallas-Fort Worth region home. “It’s a great tech hub. It’s a great transportation hub as well.” Now, those workers will have a chance to gather and swap ideas in a place of their own with amenities such as a wellness room, fitness centre, cafe and lounge – a definite step up from the co-working facility that previously served as the firm’s Dallas-area workspace. Many large tech companies have scaled back their real-estate footprints since COVID as employees became accustomed to working from home. But such is not necessarily the case at Kinaxis, Paterson said, with Dallas being a prime example. “People wanted to come in, have meetings, get together and the (co-working space) couldn’t accommodate them,” she said. “We had a lot of buildings to choose from that were already outfitted, that were in beautiful areas, that had great amenities, that could give us more space and actually cost us less than a serviced (shared) office. Financially, it was a no-brainer. Physically, it works because we have more amenities and we could host bigger groups, bigger meetings. It made a lot of sense for us to do this.” Next on Paterson’s real-estate to-do list is finding a bigger office in the Netherlands, where Kinaxis is quickly outgrowing its Rotterdam-based hub that opened about a year ago. She also thinks the company will soon need to upsize its footprint in Tokyo and consider its next move in Singapore, where the co-working space it now occupies is bursting at the seams. “Stay tuned for more,” she said with a chuckle.