MEC’s Mayville plant manager, Tim Birkholz was asked to be among one of the presenters at WMEP's 13^th annual Manufacturing Matters! Conference. This year's conference gave timely, hard-hitting practical information to help businesses navigate through the economic recovery. The target audience for the Manufacturing Matters! Conference is small to mid-size manufacturers. You’ll also find companies with products and/or services that support Wisconsin manufacturers.

 

Tim Birkholz, presented on the subject of ROI with Lean Six Sigma in Small and Mid-size Companies. “The need for Lean Six Sigma was not thought about as an operational improvement tool at first. We then found a need to formalize and document current continuous improvement projects. We partnered with current customers and quickly engaged all of our employees, and leaders began to emerge.”

 

MEC currently has 14 green belts, 1 black belt and identified $1,215,000 in savings YTD. “Our CI mission is to lead the organization in reducing costs, eliminating waste, and reducing lead times, as well as promoting integration of CI process and tools into the MEC culture.” Among identifying $1,140K in customer savings, some other projects MEC focused on were; improving systems for tracking costs on paint line, identifying and implementing energy savings, reviewing offline programming of robots; reducing setup times over all processes; and reducing scrap and rework.

 

MEC is dedicated to a future with more continuous improvement projects within the organization, an ongoing journey that will leverage the products and service MEC offers even more.