Meet the 2025 IndustryWeek Best Plants Award Winners: Marvelous Manufacturers

Manufacturing excellence is a joy to behold. It is a picture painted of shop-floor team members chasing down the root cause of a quality hiccup and developing a permanent fix. It is a picture of engineers huddling with machine operators to discuss how best to lay out a new manufacturing line. It is a picture of open communication lines between customers and suppliers to figure out how to meet difficult deadlines and extreme requirements in a way to ensure that everyone wins. It is a picture of high quality, on-time delivery and extreme efficiency.

It is all that and a whole lot more. And while manufacturing excellence is a joy to behold, it is not easy to attain, and it is even harder to hold onto. And, in the heat of getting quality products where they need to be when they need to be there, manufacturing excellence often goes unrecognized when it instead deserves to be celebrated.

IndustryWeek is here to celebrate manufacturing excellence. Our annual IW Best Plants Awards competition annually shines a light on manufacturing plants across North America that are achieving outstanding performances, frequently under less-than-optimal conditions but always with enviable teamwork, committed leaders and a “we will do it” attitude.

This year, we are thrilled to celebrate four manufacturing plants, two in the United States and two in Canada, that exemplify manufacturing excellence. Without further ado, please welcome the 2025 IndustryWeek Best Plants Award winners:

Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies
Santa Ana, California
Elastomer sealing for aerospace applications

Intertape Polymer Group Inc.
Tremonton, Utah
High clarity olefin shrink and stretch film

MSM, Magna Powertrain Inc.
Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada
Transmission components

Pullmatic Mfg. Magna Powertrain Inc.
Markham, Ontario, Canada
Transmission components

“The specific things that impress our editors and outside judges about excellent plants changes every year, but several key things stay consistent. The best of the best take everything seriously, especially their people,” says IndustryWeek Editor-in-Chief Robert Schoenberger. “Great managers build up their teams and empower people to do great work, and we see that philosophy in all of this year’s winners.”

IndustryWeek will share the stories of the 2025 IW Best Plants Award winners at www.industryweek.com in the upcoming weeks—not simply their performances but the practices, technologies and processes they employ to achieve those performances.

Our hope is that their stories will elevate what you believe is possible within your own manufacturing organizations.

Again, congratulations to our 2025 IW Best Plants Award winners.

About the IW Best Plants Awards

The IndustryWeek Best Plants Awards program annually recognizes manufacturing plants in the United States, Canada and Mexico that are on the leading edge of efforts to increase competitiveness, enhance customer satisfaction, and create stimulating and rewarding work environments.

Each year, winners are invited to participate in the competition, which begins a months-long evaluation and selection process. Plants fill out an in-depth questionnaire that includes a mix of essay and multiple-choice questions, and also are asked to provide a supporting statement that provides additional perspective about the facility. A rigorous review of applications is performed by a panel of IndustryWeek editors, who are aided by independent evaluations from manufacturing experts. The panel looks for evidence of a comprehensive effort to achieve world-class manufacturing capability, including in such areas as leadership, quality, employee involvement, supplier partnerships, technology implementation, production systems, competitiveness and more. The winners must demonstrate improved performance metrics as a result of their efforts.

Selections are not finalized until site visits.