The winners of Managing Automation's fourth annual Progressive Manufacturing 50 Awards certainly aren't the only organizations that face a wide variety of intensifying competitive challenges. These days, just about every manufacturer, large and small, must cope with stiff challenges from low-cost offshore competitors, rising energy and raw materials costs, escalating levels of regulation, and soaring customer expectations — among other things.
But what sets the Progressive Manufacturing 50 Award winners apart is that, rather than accepting these challenges passively, they have aggressively set out to shift the balance of power back in their favor, often through the innovative use of technology.
Take Dole Foods, for example. Faced with consumers who are increasingly concerned about food contamination and a rising tide of regulation, Dole invested $1.3 million in an RFID project that allows the world's largest fresh food producer to quickly trace every bin of produce all the way back to the field where it was grown. The sensor-equipped RFID tags can detect the temperatures at which produce is stored, and that information is transmitted from the field (literally) to process owners via cellular or satellite networks. The project has allowed Dole to increase customer confidence while reducing waste and supply chain bottlenecks.
The following roster of 2008 Progressive Manufacturing 50 winners is full of manufacturing enterprises that have pulled off similar game-changing initiatives. Each of the PM 50 winners was named to the list by a group of 13 distinguished judges, who, after evaluating a record number of Progressive Manufacturing nominations describing a mind-boggling array of impressive transformational projects, collaboratively selected this year's winners.