Whiting Door Manufacturing Corp.
Big Improvement Seen in Handling Custom Orders
Alexandra Whiting, Project CoordinatorWe’ve continued to build on the processes that Insyte helped us put in place. The project helped to unify our efforts, and gave us the tools to continue achieving our goals.
The Company
Headquartered in Akron NY, Whiting Door is a prosperous, family-owned manufacturer of roll-up doors for trucks, and custom wall, floor and door panels for the transportation industry.
The Challenge
The Custom Laminate Division of Whiting Door faced serious challenges in handling requests for quotation and orders for custom panels. Quotations took weeks instead of days to complete. Costs and delivery exceeded original estimates. Design changes during production delayed shipment, increased costs and disrupted production. Unanticipated and costly manufacturing issues also arose during production start-up delaying on-time shipment. Whiting recognized that it needed an outside perspective to assist them in resolving these long discussed issues.
Our Solution
Insyte’s approach to improve the situation was to unify and align the efforts of numerous people across multiple departments at two locations. A 10-member cross-functional team met regularly for several months to identify and prioritize issues, set goals, reach consensus on solutions and manage completion of the improvement tasks. As improvements were made the team became more comfortable working together and more confident in making changes and the pace of execution gained momentum. The team documented checklists, templates and processes to improve consistency, quality and efficiency in the quotation and order handling processes. Individual roles and responsibilities were clarified to ensure checks and balances in the new processes. With confidence that the company could handle more orders, the team recommended website improvements to attract more customer inquiries.
