Business Management
Uponor named 2013 Manufacturer of the Year by Manufacturers Alliance
April 15, 2013
On April 11, the Manufacturers Alliance honored Uponor as the 2013 Manufacturer of the Year in the large-company category. The Manufacturers Alliance is an association providing peer-to-peer training, education, and resources that allow Midwest manufacturing companies to continuously grow, improve, and stay competitive.
Uponor is a relative newcomer to the Manufacturers Alliance’s Manufacturer of the Year awards. In fact, last year was the first year the company was nominated and came in as runner-up.
The Manufacturers Alliance chose Uponor because of several lean and operational efficiencies the company had implemented in the past year, including:
• Improving overall equipment efficiency (OEE) by 7.8 percent
• Decreasing non-value added (NVA) by 19 percent
• Decreasing scrap rate by 9 percent
• Decreasing variable production cost (VPC) by 6.3 percent
• Improving lacquer lines changeover from three-and-a-half hours to 10 minutes
• Improving pipe recoil changeover from 45 minutes to two minutes
• Best year for reducing severity and frequency of accidents
• Sharing lean processes with office personnel, resulting in a new product catalog lean process that reduced production costs by 21 percent and production time from 207 days to 30 days.
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