Maine MEP Selects Steel-Pro as Maine’s Manufacturer of the Year for 2019

Located on the shores of Rockland Harbor, Maine, Steel-Pro is a 52-person custom manufacturer of ASME code pressure vessels, biopharmaceutical equipment, vacuum chambers, storage tanks and other custom-designed equipment. The quality and craftsmanship required to be a player in this industry is at the pinnacle of welding and fabrication. Steel-Pro employees continually reach or exceed requirements. Steel-Pro was founded in 1978 and generously converted to an employee-owned company in 2014.

Steel-Pro reached out to Maine MEP, part of the MEP National Network™, for help retaining their largest customer. The customer, a large manufacturer of biopharmaceuticals, had set some very aggressive goals around cost reduction and therefore lower pricing. The customer has a long history of implementing Lean Manufacturing at their suppliers and offered to send their consultants in to do the work with Steel-Pro. Maine MEP was chosen to complete this implementation along with a simultaneous ISO 9001 implementation.

A recently facilitated Material Flow Kaizen was but one of many that Steel-Pro has completed with Maine MEP. After initial implementation, Steel-Pro Facilitators and Internal Auditors have sustained the work over the past 5 years. Maine MEP is primarily supporting their internal capability at this time with recent events such as Kaizen/VSM Refresher, Root Cause Analysis Training and Toyota Kata for Daily Improvement instruction. Maine MEP is very pleased to have been called upon for 14 training events at Steel-Pro and looks forward to working closely with them in the future.