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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.
