It’s celebration season at IndustryWeek. We’ve just concluded our latest IndustryWeek Best Plant Awards competition, an annual effort to showcase operational excellence taking place at manufacturing plants across North America.

Good manufacturing operations aren’t hard to find. Plenty of facilities are doing things right—taking steps to improve quality, reduce waste and improve on-time delivery. IW Best Plants winners take it a step further, however. IW Best Plants winners share a belief that every team member’s effort contributes to the success of the whole, and they build stimulating and rewarding work environments to support those team members. IW Best Plants winners keep customer satisfaction at the forefront of their decision-making and partner with their supply chain to make excellence happen. IW Best Plants winners never stop examining their processes, their technologies and their strategies for improvement opportunities, and then leap on those opportunities.

And IW Best Plants Award winners deliver performance excellence daily, routinely, and know that tomorrow they will do even better. For IW Best Plants winners, improvement never ends.

This year marks our 36th class of IW Best Plants honorees. Four manufacturing plants—two in the United States and one each in Mexico and Canada—exemplify the teamwork, leadership, processes and performances that build winning organizations. We salute the 2026 IW Best Plants Award winners.

Our 2026 IW Best Plants honorees are:

Bullen Ultrasonics - Miller Williams Facility
Eaton, Ohio
Precision machining services of advanced ceramics

Cooper Standard El Jarudo
Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico
Automotive components including fuel rails

Intertape Polymer Group
Carbondale, Illinois
Pressure sensitive tape

LB Foster Rail Technologies Corp.
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Friction control railroad products

"In an era of business uncertainty, successful collaboration between internal teams is key to manufacturing success. This year's IW Best Plants winners all have demonstrated the unified commitment to product quality, worker safety, and top-notch customer service that sets them apart from their peers," says IndustryWeek Editor-in-chief Thomas Wilk.

In the coming weeks, IndustryWeek will share the stories of the individual winners at IndustryWeek.com. While their paths to success are very different, they share a similar framework: Put the right people in the right places with the right tools and the right mindsets, and great things can happen.

It is our pleasure to celebrate the 2026 IW Best Plants Award winners. As we share their stories, we encourage you to learn from their efforts and grab ideas that make sense as you pursue your own path to operational excellence.

Congratulations to our 2026 IndustryWeek Best Plants Award winners.

Meet the Winners in Spartanburg, South Carolina

IndustryWeek also will celebrate the 2026 IW Best Plants Award winners during an awards ceremony at the 2026 IndustryWeek Operations Leadership Summit, which will be held October 20-22 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Come see and hear from the winners at this show.

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. (Here are all the winners from 1990-2025.)

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.