Lean Manufacturing
Blog Tag
What We Learned at Recent Continuous Improvement Workshops
The Manufacturers Alliance is an association that provides a platform for manufacturers to come together for training, education, best practice sharing, and exchanging industry ideas. IWCO Direct has been a member for many years, participating in numerous seminars and workshops [...]
As Three Executives Receive Promotions, We’re Wishing a Fond Farewell to Our Long-Time President & CFO
Change is a constant at IWCO Direct. Today, we proudly announced three well-deserved promotions within our leadership team, and also announced Joe Morrison has retired as president and CFO. Joe will be sorely missed. First, let’s review the exciting news. Jake Hertel, who has been vice president of finance since 2012, has been promoted to executive vice president and CFO [...]
Implementing Our Strategy to Reduce Front-End Process Cycle Times
Since the Front-End project’s initiation in 2017, IWCO Direct has been on a mission to streamline our front-end process. Several system enhancements, coupled with extensive training on new processes, helped our teams reduce Front-End process cycle time by 30% in 2018. We’ve been able to continue that trend through the first half of 2019. The Front-End process cycle time is measured [...]
Making Lean Management a Top-to-Bottom Effort
My colleague Meg Hanaman and I have been speaking a lot lately about the implementation of Steel Business System (SBS) methodology into our Continuous Improvement and Lean manufacturing efforts. As you can imagine with a company of our size, this is a huge undertaking that has already resulted in many process improvements across all departments [...]
Insights from the 2019 PIA Continuous Improvement Conference
For the past five years, we’ve been eager attendees of the Continuous Improvement Conference, and this year was no exception. The insights and information we’ve brought back from these gatherings have helped us sharpen our own quality focus and build a strong Lean Manufacturing program [...]
