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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Sometimes external changes force a company to adapt its business model, but a truly progressive manufacturer doesn't wait for fate to intervene. |
Until the fall of 2001, InVision Technologies Inc. was a small manufacturer of tomography systems used by airports to detect explosives. All of the company's manufacturing took place on one production line at its Newark, CA, headquarters. Then Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. "Suddenly we were told by the Federal Aviation Administration that we had to increase our output of machines by tenfold in 10 months," recalls Wally Orlow, then operations vice president at the company. "We had to rethink everything we were doing." Finding a traditional contract manufacturer (CM) to pick up the slack wasn't an option. Normally it would have taken a CM six months just to get certified and into production. So InVision got creative. Orlow found a contractor, CoorsTek Inc. (Golden, CO), that was willing to partner closely with InVision, and the two companies quickly built a second production line identical to the existing one. Working side-by-side with InVision's team, CoorsTek's crew quickly learned InVision's production processes, right down to the kanban system. Then CoorsTek built two more identical production lines at its own nearby facility. [Click to continue] |