Lean Manufacturing
Blog Tag
Showcasing Our Critical to Quality Initiative to the Manufacturing Alliance
In February, IWCO Direct hosted the Manufacturing Alliance Lean Enterprise Peer Group for a Critical-to-Quality (CTQ) event to showcase efforts we’ve made to ensure customer satisfaction. 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.
“Getting Down and Dirty” to Improve Processes with the Annual Steel Partners Presidents Kaizen
IWCO Direct hosted Steel Partners’ annual, week-long “Presidents Kaizen” earlier this month. The purpose of the week was to bring executive teams together to demonstrate to IWCO Direct employees Steel Partners’ “top down” approach to Lean manufacturing principles […]
New Ideas, New Friends, and a Bit of Fair Food: IWCO Direct Hosts Steel Partners EH&S Council in MN
At the end of August, we welcomed members of the Steel Partners Environmental, Health & Safety (EH&S) Council to Minnesota for their week-long annual meeting. The 54 members in attendance represented 35 locations from 11 different Steel Partners companies. Our Chanhassen campus acted as home base to facilitate the communication of best management practices for EH&S […]
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 [...]
Quality and Effort: Reading Seth Godin Through a Continuous Improvement Lens
Marketer, author, and recent AMA Hall of Famer Seth Godin has a bit of a celebrity status here at IWCO Direct. When he posted a blog in early November about the relationship between quality and effort (you can read it here), it quickly made its way to my desk. In it, Seth uses his […]
The Steel Business System is Changing Our Continuous Improvement for the Better—Here’s How
As my colleague Pat Sondreal noted in his July post, one of the major benefits IWCO Direct has experienced since joining the Steel Partners family of companies has been the introduction of the Steel Business System (SBS) methodology to augment our already robust Continuous Improvement and Lean manufacturing efforts. Throughout 2018, the Continuous Improvement […]
