EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS: KEVIN NICHOLSON

CRITICAL ISSUES
We are living in and working in a global economy. Customer requirements will continue to become more demanding as we all compete globally.

The solutions to these critical issues are many. Focusing on continuous improvement is important. Listening and learning from our customers is critical. Removing waste from our systems is crucial. Using some of the lean continuous improvement tools will help us respond effectively to these issues.

For example, our company uses the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality program to help us identify opportunities for improvement. In fact, we are expanding our European operations, headquartered in Germany, in 2009. This will help us better respond to our customers in that region of the world.

We are making a variety of capital investments and information system investments that will help us serve our customers better and more quickly.

CURRENT TRENDS
I see the long-term demand for sheet metal products and a world-class supply chain as being a market reality for the future. Our industry must help our customers cope with rising material costs, rising labor costs and quicker delivery demands.

For example, some of our tooling designs can help customers eliminate secondary operations and reduce labor or material costs, while other designs can help improve machine uptime. These sorts of customer demands will continue to challenge the industry.

Partnering with the customers is another prevalent industry trend. Sales engineers must be very skilled to help identify improvement opportunities at the customer site as they analyze their sheet metal fabrication operations. This is another method that our industry can add value to the end user.

We must use a variety of techniques to help us deliver product more quickly to the customer. Lean improvement techniques are a primary method and have been successful improving our delivery performance over the past few years. At our company, we conduct a Kaizen (week long, focused continuous improvement effort) every three weeks. These are targeted at both manufacturing and office business processes.

Recently, we conducted a kaizen that studied how we quote and process orders. By the end of the week, we had made strong improvements in how we quote and process orders to our customers. If we can quote more quickly, we can deliver more quickly.

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