Owen Industries Celebrates Retirement of Rick Brendel

Rick Brendel started with PVS in May 1985. Rick started in the Accounting department and has been with the company for 32 years. His job title started out as Account Manager, and promoted to Controller.

We interviewed Rick on his experiences with PVS.

Owen Industries: What did you value most about you experience working at PVS during your many years of tenure?

Rick Brendel: The relationships I’ve created with the people I work with.

OII: What do you consider to be the most significant change that helped the company grow?

RB: Technology. Inventory and purchasing was documented manually. More computers means more time for growing and less time recording.

OII: Do you recall a past project that challenged the team? One of those “They said it can’t be done” projects?

RB: Computer conversion, when BAI was upgraded to SAP. BAI was the first ERP system, SAP integrated several accounting processes. It was a lot of work, and required much knowledge and teamwork from several groups of people.

OII: What do you think the future has in store for PVS and for Owen Industries?

RB: Growth. The personnel will continue to grow and make technological improvements and continue with innovations.

OII: What’s different from the way things were done your first day on the job from the way they are done now?

RB: Everything was manual with a pencil and calculator. It became much faster with computers. If something needed to be changed, you had to erase and start over recalculating, now you can change one number in a spreadsheet.

The Culture has changed, the office was very ‘old school’, I wore a coat and tie at the office. Things have loosened up over the years.

Rick’s post retirement plans include hiking, biking, kayaking and photography. Possibly a part-time job, maybe in accounting….maybe not!