Author: Jennifer Ayers

Tour Focus: Lean Principles in Practice Host Company – A-dec website A-dec designs and manufactures dental equipment at their headquarters in Newberg, Oregon. The A-dec vision began with a simple idea: make the best better. From their simple beginnings, A-dec has emerged as one of the most respected names in the dental industry. In 1964, founders Ken and Joan Austin made the biggest choice of their lives: risk it all to start a company of their own. Little did they know that an invention and a dream would help revolutionize the world of dentistry. 60 years later, A-dec is an employer of choice and the world’s leading manufacturer of reliable dental operatory equipment. They continue to work for the betterment of dentistry and embed their values into the work they…

Host Company – World Class Technology (WCT) website World Class Technology (WCT), located in McMinnville, OR has quickly become a global leader in the latest Metal Injection Molding techniques. Years of refining techniques have created uncompromising quality, high yields, and cost efficiency. WCT's state of the art equipment includes CAD/CAM design, CNC, EDM, Metal Injection Molding (MIM), Sintering and Coining. Our first exposure to CI was in 2019 when we invited Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership to come in and help with a backlog problem in one of our production lines which resulted in a huge success. Since then, CI has been one of our main focuses for identifying Value Added and Non-Value Added steps in our production process. We’re still new to this CI mindset and still learning every day to…

Host Company – Ichor Systems (website link) Ichor is the leader in the design, engineering and manufacturing of critical fluid delivery subsystems and components for semiconductor capital equipment. Our products include the gas and chemical delivery subsystems that are key elements in the process tools used for commercial semiconductor device manufacturing. At our Tualatin, Oregon facility, our key processes include plastic fabrication for chemical delivery systems and stainless fabrications for gas delivery systems. Tour Summary Our goal as we began re-energizing our CI program a few years ago was a strong focus on sustaining improvement and employee engagement.  As we moved forward implementing 5S, visual management, and standard work, we wanted to ensure continuous improvement efforts were ongoing, recognized, and shared among all our sites.  One of the key management practices…