What Does It Take to Be an IndustryWeek Best Plants Contender?
The question is an easy one: What does it take to be an IndustryWeek Best Plants contender? The answer is not so simple. Because facilities, products and processes are quite diverse, direct comparisons among plants can be misleading when determining what is “best.” The 5-minute manufacturing cycle time of a food manufacturer is not better than the 2-day cycle time of a commercial HVAC system manufacturer just because it is shorter, for example.
Nevertheless, over its 30-plus year history, IW Best Plants judges have found reliable indicators of manufacturing leadership: low employee turnover, strong on-time delivery to customers, a robust culture of continuous improvement and, most importantly, year-over-year improvement.
Below we share five of the questions asked on the IW Best Plants entry form, and it provides the average and median responses from IndustryWeek’s Best Plants winners and finalists for the past five years, from 2020/21 to 2025.
No plant is perfect, not even an IndustryWeek Best Plants winner, as its people will tell you. But when a winner or finalist stumbles, they simply step up the opportunity to improve.
If these data spur your interest in the IW Best Plants Awards (we recently launched the 2026 competition), be sure to click through to the end, where we include links to additional information as well as more data that can serve as useful general benchmarking references.