The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) has announced the five recipients of the AME 2016 Excellence Award. The AME Excellence Award primarily recognizes North American manufacturing plants that have demonstrated excellence in manufacturing and business. The award acknowledges continuous improvement, best practices, creativity and innovation.
The AME Excellence Award has a rigorous selection process that begins when a company submits an extensive achievement report based on the AME Excellence Award evaluation criteria. Achievement reports are evaluated by the AME award assessment team. For companies that score high enough in this achievement report review, an intensive site visit is completed, during which a volunteer team of manufacturing practitioners validates the submitted achievement report. Recipients of the Excellence Award are selected based on the combined results of the achievement report review and site visit feedback.
The 2016 AME Excellence Award recipients are:
Accuride de Mexico – Monterrey, Mexico
Accuride de Mexico’s wheel-production facility has focused on a robust use of policy deployment and aggressive continuous improvement initiatives. The facility has pull systems and an excellent continuous improvement process that utilizes value stream mapping and green belt projects to improve processes and products.
Goodyear Innovation Center – Akron, Ohio
Goodyear Innovation Center has done an outstanding job of developing sound, complete and useful standards for nearly all areas AME examined. The steps of design, technology development, skill development, strategic sourcing, product and platform development and other areas were all found to be well thought out and robust.
Littelfuse – Wuxi, China
Littelfuse has a comprehensive safety program that includes monthly safety reviews. Safety is included on supplier scorecards, and every associate is expected to turn in one safety suggestion each month. The facility uses value stream mapping to identify improvement opportunities, which feeds into the policy deployment process.
MillerCoors Trenton Brewery – Trenton, Ohio
MillerCoors Trenton Brewery has done an excellent job creating an engaged workforce that is continually driving measurable improvements throughout the organization, according to AME. The strong partnership between MillerCoors and the local union has enabled empowered teams to collaboratively produce world-class business results.
O.C. Tanner – Salt Lake City, Utah
O.C. Tanner has a culture that respects people and goes out of its way to recognize and celebrate team members’ contributions to the organization. Its leaders embrace their responsibility to regularly coach, develop and encourage team members.
“It is an honor for AME to recognize the 2016 Excellence Award recipients,” said AME President and CEO George Saiz. “The AME Excellence Award validates the hard work of so many who are engaged, committed and invested in sustained continuous improvement. We applaud these outstanding organizations and their employees for their contributions and participation in the journey toward enterprise excellence.”
AME says the Excellence Award is not something that can be achieved by one person or one company leader. It takes all team members working together to achieve the level of enterprise excellence that the AME Excellence Award recognizes. With that in mind, AME representatives will visit award recipients’ facilities to present awards in person so that everyone working in these facilities can participate in the celebration. AME representatives will visit Goodyear’s Innovation Center facility on Sept. 13, O.C. Tanner’s facility on Sept. 22, MillerCoors’ facility on Oct. 17, Accuride de Mexico’s facility on Oct.18 and Littelfuse’s facility on Nov. 3.
Recipients also will be honored at the AME 2016 International Conference, taking place Oct. 24-28 in Dallas. Recipients will share their best practices with other lean and continuous improvement practitioners in attendance.
To learn more about the Excellence Award and the 2016 recipients, visit ame.org/excellence-awards.
