Winners take many roads to improvement

摘要

Sponsored by the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), the Manufacturing Excellence award honors companies that demonstrate significant progress in continuous improvement over a three-year period. The 2011 winners are: Acumed LLC, Aera Energy LLC, Autoliv, IEC Electronics, Medtronic Spinal, Milliken's Johnston Plant, and Raytheon Advanced Product Center. For Jeff Rosenlund, director of business development at Milliken and Co., the award for the plant was the culmination of a continuous improvement process for the specialty fabrics manufacturer that has raised productivity by 23% while lowering off-quality product by 91% to less than 1% of total output. For Roy Wiley, spinal and biologies site lead at Medtronic's Warsaw operation, the key to their plant's improvement has been to include a key member of the management sometimes overlooked in the production process.