This year, Zenith Technologies is celebrating its 20th year in business. Over that time, the company has delivered manufacturing software systems to the life sciences industry.
Zenith’s executive chairman and owner Brendan O’Regan talks about what has driven the business’ success over the years and what the anniversary means to him:
What does the 20-year anniversary mean to you?
I have always felt privileged to be part of the pharmaceutical industry; it’s an incredibly ethical business to be involved in with so much of the work going to enhancing people’s lives.
We’ve been operating successfully in the sector for 20 years, in that time we’ve been involved in automating and validating plants from start-ups, to playing an integral role in the delivery of novel products for some of the world’s biggest in Life Sciences. The breadth and importance of Zenith’s work, and the tremendously skilled people we have at Zenith is something I’m incredibly proud of.
What have been the highlights for you?
Only three years after starting the business, Zenith went international. We had been working with a top Life Science company in their Cork facility, and it was great testament to our work that the company asked for our help with its plant in Singapore. We set up an office not long after and have spent the years since then supporting our customers in the UK, the US, Germany, Belgium, India and China and more recently Switzerland.
Zenith has always been customer-centric, we focus on understanding our customer’s pain-points and delivering a solution, sometimes that has meant setting up a local office in another country to ensure the service is there.
Something else that I always think of as a great part our success is the number of jobs we’ve created. Close to 4,000 engineers have come and gone through Zenith over the last 20 years and we currently employ over 800, I look at those numbers and feel that Zenith has been a big part of a lot of people’s careers and that makes me very proud.
What has driven Zenith’s success?
There’s a number of things but I think the most important are the people that work for us and their can-do attitude, customer-centricity and focus on creating real and tangible solutions that deliver results. We don’t do things for the sake of it, we have spent a lot of years building up trust with our customers, we are always focused on delivering return on investment if we hadn’t we wouldn’t last five minutes in this industry.
There’s also an appetite for change throughout the business, we’re constantly adapting and adopting new technology and evolving in-line with customer demands and the advances in technology.
In 2017, Zenith was recognised as a Great Place to Work (GPTW), what is the company doing well in terms of employees?
The recognition from GPTW is a great achievement, it’s a great way of connecting with employees and implementing their feedback to improve the working environment.
What do you think the next 20 years will bring for Zenith?
Zenith is all about evolution, we change with new technologies and when customer demand shifts and that makes us strong as a business. It’s quite ambitious but we want to be triple our current size in ten-years’ time.
Partnering with GE has made a big difference and we’re now at the forefront of technology, continuing the journey we’ve started and looking at niche technologies that support our efforts. We’ll be playing a big part in delivering new and novel solutions in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and data analytics going forward.
We’re world leaders in automation and manufacturing in pharma and our industry is constantly evolving, it’s an exciting space to be in and we’re lucky to be involved with it. We’ve a huge part to play directly in supporting the improvement of people’s lives in the coming years.