Company Profile
Founded in 1954, Fiberglass Fabricators, Inc. (FFI) has served the water and wastewater industries with thousands of product installations in a wide array of applications. Specializing in weirs, baffles, troughs, launder and tank covers as well as custom products, they have the experience and know-how to tackle a broad range of composites projects.
As fiberglass is required more often in corrosive environments across multiple industries, the company continuously seeks to be the first choice of end users, contractors and engineers.
Situation
Due to their involvement in an increasingly competitive composites industry, the company reached out to Polaris MEP. The company recognized a need to cut waste out of their processes in order to compete with companies in the southern United States who have drastically lower overhead. The company had begun a lean initiative in the 1990’s but through lack of standardization and some personnel changes, the effort subsided.
The company selected Polaris MEP because of the center’s reputation for results and the project managers’ expertise.
IMPACTS
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16 jobs added/retained | |
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$30,000 invested in new equipment | |
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$100,000 investment in other area of business |
“The lean effort is going well. Our Polaris MEP project manager, who is now involved in our Lean Steering Committee, has been a great help.”
Adam Larocque, Design Engineer
Solution
Polaris MEP introduced company leadership to specific continual Improvement tools and methods via Lean 101 trainings. We helped to identify a continuous improvement team ultimately selected by Fiberglass Fabricators, Inc. management.
Polaris MEP helped lead and facilitate Fiberglass Fabricators staff to increase readiness for production leadership. This was accomplished through training and implementation of Lean Manufacturing tools and concepts including
- Visual Workplace Organization,
- Value Stream Mapping and
- One-Piece Flow Production.
Polaris MEP developed project plans for high value production areas and projects with measurable impacts and outcomes which are easily communicated to stakeholders throughout the organization.