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 […]
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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.”
