IN GOOD COMPANY

摘要

The predecessor of what would become General Cable Corp. supplied the insulated wire to Samuel Morse for the world's first telegraph message in 1844. More than 150 years later, General Cable still knows a thing or two about serving market leaders. Today, the General Cable Automotive Products plant in Altoona, Pa., aligns with leading customers and suppliers in the automotive aftermarket and captures an increasing share of its customers' increasing shares for ignition wire sets. This "win with the winners" strategy, though, is meaningless without the agile customer-oriented operations in Altoona to back it up. General Cable Altoona is just one of two assembly plants in the 28-plant General Cable worldwide family and the only, one supplying the automotive market. Nonetheless, Larry Fast, senior vice president of North American Operations, calls Altoona a model facility for the corporation and a breeding ground for best practices and process improvements. Altoona relies on a foundation of lean manufacturing principles to eliminate waste in processes, improve order times and tightly sync its operations with its supply base; and it complements lean with Six Sigma tools to hone critical quality metrics.