Association for Manufacturing Excellence Announces Recipients of the 2018 AME Excellence Award

The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME)’s Excellence Award primarily recognizes manufacturing plants that have demonstrated excellence in manufacturing and business, acknowledging their continuous improvement, best practices, creativity and innovation.

The AME 2018 Excellence Award recipients are:

FPT Powertrain Technologies – Bourbon-Lancy, France (a CNH Industrial Company):
FPT Powertrain Technologies designs, produces and sells powertrains for on- and
off-road vehicles, marine and power generation applications. The company employs more than 8,000 people worldwide, in ten manufacturing plants and seven R&D centers. The AME assessment team highlighted FPT’s strong leadership culture, which respects people and goes out of its way to recognize and celebrate team members’ contributions to the organization. The assessment team also praised FPT for its pursuit of advanced technology, including Industry 4.0., and for aligning its personnel development plans to assure workforce readiness for the new technology.

Goodyear Innovation Center Manufacturing (ICM) – Akron, Ohio:
The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is one of the world’s largest tire companies. It employs about 64,000 people and manufactures its products in 48 facilities in 22 countries. The Innovation Center Manufacturing (ICM) plant is the premier race tire production facility for Goodyear and the exclusive supplier of race tires for NASCAR and the NHRA. Founded in 1916, the ICM plant is the oldest active Goodyear manufacturing facility. This year, Goodyear celebrates 64 years with NASCAR, one of the longest-running sponsorships in any major sport. In their evaluation, AME assessors highlighted ICM’s safety reporting system, a closed loop system and a Goodyear best practice that focuses on identifying near misses and analyzing events, as well as its operational excellence in leadership, workplace culture and employee relations.

IVECO – Valladolid, Spain (a CNH Industrial Company):
Iveco is a brand of the CNH Industrial Group, a world leader in Capital Goods listed on the New York Stock Exchange and on the Mercato Telematico Azionario of the Borsa Italiana. IVECO designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of light, medium and heavy commercial vehicles, city and intercity buses and coaches, special vehicles, defense vehicles and off-road vehicles for construction and mining work. Iveco employs more than 26,000 people worldwide across production sites in 11 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America. The IVECO factory in Valladolid is a world reference for transformation toward industry 4.0. Due to its system for continuous improvement, the plant has succeeded in gaining efficiency, quality and adaptability of production systems. The AME assessment team highlighted Iveco’s robust improvement suggestion system for its facility-wide participation and its work instruction tools, which include visual aids and real-time assembly instructions at the point of use.

Littelfuse – Lipa City, Philippines:
Littelfuse is a world leader in circuit protection with global platforms in power control and sensing. Littelfuse has over 10,000 employees in more than 40 locations throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. The AME assessment team highlighted Littelfuse, Philippines strong culture of respect for the individual and its creative, immediate and accountable execution of Littelfuse’s “DMAIC” daily continuous improvement cycle. The assessment team also praised the company’s simple and easy-to-read visual management techniques and its spare parts Kanban room, which was well-managed and impeccably organized with zero clutter. This marks the third consecutive year of Littelfuse facilities receiving the AME Excellence Award.

The AME Excellence Award has a rigorous selection process that begins when a company completes and submits a self-assessment—including supporting metrics—based on the AME Excellence Award evaluation criteria. Applications are evaluated by the AME award assessment team. AME believes that excellence is best validated by going to the gemba. For companies that score high enough, an intensive site visit is conducted by a volunteer team of manufacturing practitioners. Recipients of the Excellence Award are selected based on the combined results of the self-assessment and site visit feedback. Many past recipients said they applied for the award so they could receive the feedback report from our highly experienced volunteer practitioners.

The AME Excellence Award is not something that can be achieved by one person or one company leader. It takes all team members working together to achieve the level of enterprise excellence that the AME Excellence Award recognizes. With that in mind, AME representatives will visit award recipients’ facilities to present awards in person so that everyone working in these facilities can participate in the celebration.

Recipients will also be honored at the AME 2018 International Conference, taking place Oct. 29-Nov. 1 in San Diego, Calif. Recipients will each share a “Pearl of Excellence” with other lean and continuous improvement practitioners in attendance. To learn more about the Excellence Award and the 2018 recipients, visit http://www.ame.org/excellence-awards. To download AME’s free self-assessment tool, the AME Lean Sensei®, visit http://www.ame.org/leansensei.

About the Association for Manufacturing Excellence

The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) is the premier not-for-profit organization dedicated to the journey of continuous improvement and enterprise excellence. AME’s membership is composed of a trusted network of volunteers who are committed to leveraging the practitioner-to-practitioner and company-to-company shared-learning experience. Through engaging workshops, plant tours, webinars, summits and industry-leading conferences, AME members are continually discovering and implementing new continuous improvement strategies and best practices.

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