Sioux Steel plans to name its new distribution center in Lennox after 20-year employee Nancy Boyd. Nancy is the daughter of the late Johnnie Fischer and Mabel Fischer-Johnson.
Sioux Steel owner Scott Rysdon describes Boyd as a real life Wonder Woman. She served in the military. She divorced in the late 1990s and bought an old farmstead where she raised puppies to support her four children.
Boyd started as a welder at Koyker Manufacturing in 1998. She recently retired and then found out she had cancer.
“We have a lot of women that come to work for us, but I don’t know of another one that’s been in the factory for 20 years,” Rysdon said. “Look at inspiring people in the workforce today, Nancy Boyd is that kind of a person. That kind of dedication and spirit is what we’re trying to capture in people’s minds and hearts at our company by naming a building after her.”
Sioux Steel bought the S.E.A.M. Designs property earlier this year that is adjacent to their current property in Lennox. They have leveled the ground and will be ready to start building their 200-foot-by-500-foot tension membrane building for their distribution facility this spring. Rysdon plans on the building being ready for use by June 1.
The goal with the building is to do all of their loading indoors and to implement a new distribution philosophy.
“It was about taking a different philosophy about distribution because this is really going to be called a distribution center. What that means is that all of our products will flow to this site and they’ll be shipped from that site,” he said. “After we move from Sioux Falls, we’ll have four manufacturing areas. Normally we shipped out of all of those manufacturing areas, but because the S.E.A.M.’s lot came open, we have the opportunity to build a distribution center right there.”
They are remodeling the blue S.E.A.M. Building into offices. They also have plans to move the grain bin division into the Fusion Plastics building by 2021.