Operations

Production Pulse: Why Joining Contests Is Good for Morale and Operations

Feb. 8, 2024

With applications for the IndustryWeek Best Plants Award open, we spoke with previous winners and judges about how entering contests is about a lot more than bragging rights.

Robert Schoenberger

Awards season is here with applications open for the IndustryWeek Best Plants Award, our annual recognition of manufacturing excelllence as measured by a stringent set of performance metrics. And while bragging rights for the winners are great, awards can also improve operations.

In this episode of our bi-weekly livestream Production Pulse, we talked to:

Rick Bohan, principal and CEO of Chagrin River Consulting, a frequent IW Best Plants Award judge, and the author of a recent story about the benefits of entering these sorts of contests.
Brandon Davis, vice president of Components at Dexter Axle Corp., a Northeast Indiana company that produces parts for trailers and RVs. Davis was a 2022 winner when he was plant manager at NOV Texas Oil Tools, and he co-wrote a piece about what you can learn from entering contests with Rick Bohan.
Jill Jusko, IndustryWeek's executive editor and director of the IW Best Plants Program.

For those of you who prefer to listen to these conversations instead of watching the video, please enjoy the podcast version of this conversation.

About the Author

Robert Schoenberger

Editor-in-Chief

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robert-schoenberger-4326b810

Bio: Robert Schoenberger has been writing about manufacturing technology in one form or another since the late 1990s. He began his career in newspapers in South Texas and has worked for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi; The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky; and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland where he spent more than six years as the automotive reporter. In 2014, he launched Today's Motor Vehicles (now EV Manufacturing & Design), a magazine focusing on design and manufacturing topics within the automotive and commercial truck worlds. He joined IndustryWeek in late 2021.