CAMT will present Visual Lean Workplace at the 2006 CPEx Quest for Excellence V, to be held on the evening of October 23 and all day October 24 at the Marriott South at Park Meadows. This event features an incredible lineup of Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners, honored guests, and keynote speakers.

The 2006 CPEx Quest for Excellence event consists of an Awards and Examiner Celebration Dinner to be held from 5:30 – 9:30 pm on Monday evening, October 23, and a full day learning event focusing on “Performance at 14,000 Feet” on Tuesday October 24th. There will be a multitude of great speakers, including Debbie Collard, Director, Business Excellence, of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, as the keynote speaker.

All this is offered in addition to a variety of break-out sessions on management excellence, including CAMT’s Visual Lean Workplace session. The objective of Visual Thinking is to train and coach operators in visual order and trigger high levels of visual inventiveness. Come to the CPEx Quest for Excellence, and find out about Visual Lean, a rigorous and comprehensive approach to creating, keeping and expanding improvement in your organization.

We look forward to having you and your organization join us at this great event. We encourage you to invite other colleague organizations to one of the premier events on overall organization performance in the Rocky Mountain region.

SteelStar Corporation, of Dacono, Colorado, fabricates and installs Structural and Misc. metals for Industrial and Commercial construction. SteelStar was formed in April 2004 when Custom Design & Fabrication Inc. and McLean's Steel Fabrication and Installation merged. SteelStar currently employs 50 people.

SteelStar wanted to investigate how Lean Manufacturing could help its business, especially after merging two separate companies and combining into a new 34,000 square foot facility. The company wanted to improve efficiency and profitability. SteelStar contacted the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology (CAMT), a NIST MEP affiliate, for help.

CAMT conducted a Lean Basics class for employees to familiarize them with the concepts of Lean Manufacturing. CAMT and SteelStar worked together to conduct a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) assessment. During a VSM exercise, a current state map is compared to a future state map to uncover any non-value-added steps. The VSM assessment revealed several areas for improvement, and SteelStar made changes to its processes accordingly. The increased efficiency resulting from these changes helped the company decrease its inventory by $10,000 and its labor costs by $210,000. Additionally, SteelStar anticipates an increase in sales of 50% over 2005 numbers and retention of existing sales that would otherwise have been lost without instituting the Lean concepts.

CAMT will unveil its new web-based information- sharing and business-networking platform for Colorado manufacturers in October 2006. The Portal gives these companies a powerful tool to harness the resources in their home region more effectively. The system is user friendly and it works 24/7 to reduce the time and effort that firms spend on searching or tracking enterprise information, specific resources, potential partners and opportunities.

The Information Express Portal can leverage the information that firms provide in order to generate valuable contacts and information that firms may not know about. The system will incorporate information from leading trade points and business-to- business trade sites in the U.S., Europe, Asia and world-wide, based on mutual information-sharing agreements. A powerful central data integration engine will retrieve, organize and represent information to enable companies to utilize online markets more effectively:

• A single interface that enables buyers and suppliers to search and respond to information that is posted on a confusing array of databases and web sites.
• A system that automatically seeks to match companies with similar interests.
• Powerful search tool that allows sophisticated matching of user specific interests with multiple offers & opportunities.
• A single interface that helps firms post, manage and translate marketing messages, proposals and requests on multiple databases serving national and global markets.