Tick, tick, tick. Time flies when you are having fun. That’s a fitting motto for Jane Granger, a collector of clocks and a CSL Behring employee who is celebrating 55 years of service.
Granger works as an administrative coordinator at CSL Behring’s manufacturing site in Kankakee, Illinois. She traverses the sprawling plant several times a day with a smile on her face and athletic shoes on her feet. As part of her anniversary celebration, she spent a day as plant manager, seeing what it’s like to run a world-class manufacturing site.
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As part of her plant manager tour, Granger visited many areas of the facility, including packaging, production, manufacturing, project management, quality control and human resources. She watched product packaging line preparation, attended department meetings and took a look at building plans for major capital projects.
She enjoyed seeing her co-workers throughout the day. “Even the new people stopped me in the hallway and congratulated me on my 55 years of service. They even called me by my name.”
Her day as plant manager gave her a unique glimpse of what the role entails, but she points to her decades of service as the source of her knowledge about the leading-edge manufacturing site. She’s worked under the leadership of 10 different plant managers.
“All these managers had different methods and leadership styles, driving the company forward to success, and accomplishing incredible things for the site and community. I can say with certainty those who listened to employees and acknowledged their contributions were the most successful in making this site a leader in bio-therapeutics manufacturing,” she said.
Former plant manager, Tricia Stewart, who now heads up CSL Behring’s Broadmeadows, Australia facility, surprised her with a congratulatory phone call. Stewart told Granger that she recently met the longest-serving employee at Broadmeadows, who has clocked “only” 25 years.
Granger remembers her first day of work – March 30, 1964. She started in the IT department, now known as business technology. She remembers thinking what a big place it was and how there were so many people. “I was only going to stay three months,” she said. “I was planning on getting a job at Argonne National Laboratory following my graduation from business college, but Armour (as it was then known) called first.”
While time was ticking by, Granger has amassed a collection of 30 clocks. Eight in her collection are cuckoo clocks from Germany, gifts from colleagues who traveled there to visit another CSL Behring manufacturing site in Marburg. After so many years on the job, when the alarm clock rings, what gets her up in the morning?
“The impact of our therapies on the lives of patients is what keeps me coming to work every day,” she said.
