For the fifth straight year, Lexmark has been named a winner of the Manufacturing Leadership 100 Awards. The awards program honors the top 100 companies and individuals that are shaping the future of global manufacturing.
This is the fourth year Lexmark picked up three awards—the most a single company can win in a calendar year. The awards celebrate outstanding projects undertaken and completed by a manufacturing company.
“We are in an exclusive group of six companies that have won the maximum number of awards,” said Linda Hollembaek, vice president and general manager, Global Services Operations. “We are incredibly proud to be recognized for the work being done in this space around the world to improve our execution. These efforts clearly benefit our customers, our company and the environment.”
Lexmark won awards for Customer Value Leadership, Enterprise Technology Leadership and Sustainability Leadership.
Here are our winning projects:
Customer Value Leadership(Customer Setup transformation)
Customer Setup is a global process within Lexmark that incorporates and operationalizes written customer contracts into Lexmark enterprise systems that enable and improve the ordering of product, providing of services and billing.
Extensive research into the Customer Setup process was conducted cross-functionally throughout Lexmark. The teams worked collaboratively toward a common goal of improving the customer experience and reducing the overall lead time. This was accomplished by establishing consistent processes, implementing a global workflow tool to gain visibility to bottlenecks and defining clear metrics to measure performance.
“These operational improvements resulted in more than a 50 percent reduction in the lead time and 18 percent quality improvement since January 2014, when we implemented the initiatives,” said Elizabeth Ward, manager, Worldwide Customer Setup.
Enterprise Technology Leadership (Enterprise social networking)
In 2012, in an effort to eliminate silos of information and increase worldwide employee communication, engagement and collaboration, Lexmark began eliminating ancillary and disparate platforms and tools—including Lotus Notes, TWiki, MediaWiki, Yammer, Vignette, Xoops and DekiWiki—and moved the company to the Jive social collaboration platform, which Lexmark named “Innovate.”
Since then, there have been major improvements in customer support, product usage by our customers, knowledge management and sharing outside of functional areas, general global employee communications and feedback, new employee orientation and spot learning.
This is the first Manufacturing Leadership award Lexmark has received that spans the entire enterprise.
“While this award emphasizes technology, it’s not really about software—it is about Innovate being a collaboration and communication success,” said Dennis Pearce, enterprise knowledge architect. “We consistently have over 11,000 users logging in, creating and participating in hundreds of discussions and blog posts every month. No social networking technology would be this successful without our employees’ desire and willingness to collaborate, share information and help each other that Lexmark employees routinely display.”
Sustainability Leadership(TonerPave)
Lexmark has been looking for an efficient way to reuse and recycle thousands of tons of toner, which was going to landfill or waste for well over 10 years. Together Lexmark and longtime sustainability partner Close the Loop worked to develop TonerPave, a product that uses toner waste as an additive to asphalt for paving roads.
TonerPave was used at Lexmark’s headquarters in Lexington to resurface an 86,400 square-foot parking lot—the first project of its kind in the U.S. The project was completed in July 2015.
“The TonerPave project was a great collaboration between Lexmark, Close the Loop, and the asphalt contractor,” said David Blaine, engineer, Lexmark Cartridge Collection Program (LCCP) Operations. “This is a great application for taking toner recovered through the LCCP and turning it into a sustainable product. It was an added bonus to be the first company in North America to use TonerPave in a project here at Lexmark’s headquarters.”
The 2016 Manufacturing Leadership Award winners will be honored June 8 at a gala celebration that concludes the annual Manufacturing Leadership Summit in Carlsbad, California.