Leadership: Companies that have mastered MA's Progressive Manufacturing disciplines are led by creative, out-of-the-box thinkers who visualize and guide organizations toward transformative ways of doing business. These managers craft and communicate strategic objectives, establish key performance metrics, and arm cross-functional teams with the requisite resources to identify technologies to implement business process improvements. In sum, these individuals function as change agents, catalyzing the entire manufacturing enterprise to embrace revamped and retooled ways of doing business, while keeping technology aligned with business strategy.
Operational Excellence: Companies that achieve operational excellence are those that have mastered the ideas of continuous improvement as advocated in such disciplines as Six Sigma and lean manufacturing. They achieve measurable excellence not only in internal operations but also in those processes that involve customers, partners, and suppliers.
Business Model Mastery: A company that achieves business model mastery has examined its business model, including core competencies, in order to see what changes or additions need to be made to compete more effectively, or has re-engineered a significant business process or processes to achieve a competitive advantage. Such a company has taken a longer-term view of its business and its markets and forecast what it will take to be successful in the years ahead.
Customer Mastery: Companies that become customer-centric operationally have re-thought and re-engineered processes around customer demand and have achieved demonstrable improvements in customer satisfaction as a result. Such companies will have also achieved significant improvements in mastering information about customers and customer markets and will have leveraged that information for competitive advantage.
Data and Integration Mastery: Data and integration masters have achieved cross-functional systems/process integration among design, production, and logistics/warehousing or other functions.
Innovation Mastery: Innovation-centric companies have achieved a significant advance or breakthrough in product conception, design, or production, or the ability to deliver products to customers. Innovation can be the result of an advance in basic research, research and development, or product development.
Supply Network Mastery: Companies that have achieved supply network excellence have rethought, re-engineered, and improved the material procurement, production, and execution aspects of their supply chains to achieve faster time to market, cost reductions and efficiencies, and higher customer satisfaction ratings.
Training and Education Mastery: Leaders in the field of education and training have devised/deployed programs to advance employee knowledge and use of advanced automation and IT technologies on an ongoing basis and with demonstrable results. This may include companies that have instituted scholarship or other promotional programs to encourage secondary or college-level students to pursue a career in manufacturing, with visible results of those programs.