2016 IndustryWeek Best Plants Awards: Six Fantastic Factories

April 12, 2017
The 2016 IW Best Plants Award winners combine teamwork, talent and tenacity to deliver outstanding manufacturing performances.

Meet the 2016 IndustryWeek Best Plants Award winners, our 27th class of superior performers who convincingly demonstrate that manufacturing excellence thrives. We announced the names of the six honorees in February. Now we add color as we tell their stories.

Presenting such stories is a pleasure IndustryWeek has shared with readers since 1990, when the IW Best Plants Awards launched, and we embraced the opportunity to shine a light on the amazing work that was being done on manufacturing production floors across North America.

Our latest class of winners demonstrates that such amazing work continues.

At L.B. Foster it’s a story of single piece flow. At Johnson Controls, robust employee-development processes help deliver success, and at Maclean-Fogg Metform Group, the conversation revolves around man, machine and lean. The Firstronic story is equally compelling, and equally diverse. And while Intertape Polymer Group speaks the language of the Intertape Performance System and model machines, UTC Aerospace Systems – Aerostructures is talking takt time, ACE and standard work.

All that said, these six facilities share a winning combination of people, technologies and a process improvement mentality. Moreover, no manufacturing plant is an island, so these IW Best Plants winners embrace their partners up and down the value chain to build benefits for all.

We’ve shared some of their tales of achievement on the following pages. You can find even more online at www.industryweek.com. To get up close and personal with the 2016 IW Best Plants Award winners, join us at the IW Manufacturing & Technology Conference & Expo May 8-10 in Cleveland. The winners all will be there, sharing their stories.

Let the IW Best Plants Award winners inspire your own journey of excellence. Feel free to steal their ideas or modify them to work within your own facilities. Be the next IndustryWeek Best Plants winner. And celebrate manufacturing excellence.

More about the IndustryWeek Best Plants Awards competition.

How the Winners were Selected

IndustryWeek began accepting application requests for the 2016 IW Best Plants Awards early last year. A panel of IW editors and outside experts reviewed the applications, which reported plant practices and performances in such areas as quality, customer and supplier relations, employee involvement, productivity, cost containment, manufacturing flexibility, inventory management, safety performance and market results. Finalists then provided additional information. The selections did not become final until site visits were conducted by IW editors.

The outside experts included Larry Fast, president of Pathways to Manufacturing Excellence; John Dyer, president of JD&A – Process Innovation Co.; Bernie Nagle, executive director at the Precision Machined Products Association, and Becky Morgan, president of Fulcrum ConsultingWorks.

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