Goodrich Fuel & Utility Systems has realized excellent results from its Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma initiatives. The culture emphasizes customer focus and management regularly reviews quantitative indicators of on-time delivery, customer quality ratings and other performance measures with all employees.

What is Six Sigma?

• The term, six sigma, refers to a statistical measurement that indicates a defect rate of 3.4 per 1 million products.
• The five steps of Six Sigma program are: defining, measuring, analyzing, refining the problem, and controlling the improvement.

(from The Power of Six Sigma, by Subir Chowdhury)

Lean Enterprise

Goodrich is an industry leader in the implementation of lean enterprise techniques to streamline design, development, test, procurement and production processes.  This has resulted in a highly efficient development and production system and we continue the relentless drive to ever increasing performance by applying appropriate technology. Our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System provides the integrated data source for planning, executing and tracking our programs. The system facilitates rapid, accurate access to significant programmatic data for our customers, partners, suppliers and internal teams.  Our customers benefit from our increased responsiveness and can rely on cost-effective, high quality products being delivered on-time.

Lean Manufacturing

With a relentless pursuit of efficiency through rigorous adherence to engineering and production processes, the division has been able to continuously improve in all aspects of the design and manufacturing process. Specifically, inventory turns are much higher than peer companies.

In addition to structured efficiency initiatives such as Kaizan, employees are empowered to meet and discuss process improvements. As the people actually performing the work often know how to save time in the process, given the opportunity, they will provide solutions such as redesigning the physical layout of a production area, planning availability and location of components and automating tasks. The manufacturing facility eliminated paper drawings several years ago with immediate improvements in configuration control and design change propagation.

For more information about Goodrich Fuel and Utility Systems please contact us.