We’re thrilled to announce that Ameritex is partnering with BeehiveFund, a nonprofit management consulting organization that helps manufacturing companies achieve cultural, operational, and financial improvements while increasing morale and productivity.
For the next year, we’ll work with BeehiveFund’s team of engineering consultants to implement lean manufacturing principles and practices. We’ll streamline operations from quoting to shipping, with the goal of improving quality and reducing lead times at our custom fabrication shop.
What Is Lean Manufacturing?
Research shows that 60% of production activities in a typical manufacturing operation are waste. These wasteful activities decrease a shop’s productivity and offer no added value to customers.
The lean manufacturing methodology aims to eliminate waste while building systems and workflows that help companies optimize processes, cut costs, and improve lead times.
What’s Our Goal for This Partnership?
We’ve been interested in the lean manufacturing methodology for a long time now. So we’re excited to upgrade our lean systems at Ameritex.
Our primary goal for this partnership is the same goal that always drives us: we want to reduce lead times and improve quality for our customers.
What does this goal mean in concrete terms? It means maintaining a 2-week lead time on sheet metal fabricated weldments, even when our custom fabrication shop is at peak capacity. We are currently offering 3-5 weeks on fabricated weldments but we know we can do better.
Together with BeehiveFund, we’ll review each of our processes one at a time to identify inefficiencies. Then, they’ll help us overhaul those processes to streamline operations.
Why Now?
Business is booming at our Texas shop. We’re ready to set up a fully scalable system so our shop can continue growing.
When we reduce our lead times, we’ll have the capacity to take on more projects. We need to be able to grow and sustain the influx of work we’re building toward while maintaining high quality custom fabrications and short lead times.
We knew partnering with BeehiveFund would be an invaluable opportunity for us. So we submitted an application and underwent a full business review. We were thrilled to learn that we were awarded government funding to cover more than half of this investment!
We’re really looking forward to what this partnership has in store for us over the next year. Stay tuned for updates and hopefully even some before and after content. Want to work with a custom fabrication shop that always strives to do what’s best for customers? Go ahead and request a quote.
