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Wainwright Industries, Inc. is a 47-year-old family owned business which manufactures stamped and machined parts for US and, increasingly, foreign customers in the automotive, aerospace, home-security, and information-processing industries. With annual sales totalling about US$30 million, the company employs 275 associates (staff) at its headquarters and main I manufacturing facility in St Peters, Missouri, and at a recently opened plant in Grand Prairie, Texas.
Empowered workforce
Wainwright is constantly on the lookout for ways to improve, searching inside and outside the organization for ideas and examples on how to streamline processes, cut delivery times, make training programmes more effective, or enhance any other facet of its customer-focused operations. Its empowered workforce is a rich source of ideas, with each associate averaging more than one implemented improvement per week.
Viewing supplier-certification programmes as opportunities to improve, Wainwright has responded by earning the status of preferred supplier to a growing number of high profile and quality-conscious customers. The company also leverages the strengths of its own suppliers, tapping the expertise and capabilities of a chemical supplier, for example, in a successful effort to eliminate hazardous materials from its operations. Finally, Wainwright's search for better ways of doing business crosses industry boundaries, as evidenced by benchmarking visits to acknowledged world-class performers in the electronics, textile, and other industries.
Rising levels of customer satisfaction and steadily increasing new and repeat business indicate that Wainwright is putting good ideas into action. Since 1992 overall customer satisfaction has jumped to 95 per cent, up from 84 per cent. Over the same span, defect and scrap rates, manufacturing cycle time, and quality costs have ratcheted downward, attesting to improved levels of operational efficiency.
Five strategic indicators
Wainwright aims for "total customer satisfaction", a moving target that the company tracks through extensive sets of quality measures which are aligned with five overriding strategic indicators. In strict priority order, these indicators are: safety; internal customer satisfaction; external customer satisfaction; six sigma quality; business performance.
While this sounds scientific, and is so in its analysis, the implementation/ information-gathering exercise is simple:...