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What Forecast?
With the help of: Enterprise Minnesota
About
Craft Pattern & Mold, based in Montrose, Minnesota, is an industry leading manufacturer of prototype plastic and metal parts, as well as production tooling, for a variety of commercial and industrial applications. They offer onsite tooling, casting and machining to help OEM's develop top secret projects. This agile group can work with little advance notice, very quick turnarounds and the expectation that order specifications may change several times throughout the process. Industries Craft Pattern & Mold serves include aerospace, automotive, agriculture, construction, electronics, medical and many more.
The Challenge
Tony Cremers, the owner of Craft Pattern & Mold, had a desire to grow his business sustainably. In order to grow, Cremers knew that he had to fine tune his company's production procedures and get different parts of the operation on the same page. The niche service Craft Pattern provides requires 100% accuracy and very fast turnarounds.
We needed to get the different parts of our operation on the same page, making sure everything's complete before it goes on to the next department. As we keep growing here, we realized we need to have more structure with our process, so as not to have multiple independent projects running on their own. They need to have a path, a procedure of how they should go through the shop. There was a point - probably about three-quarters of the way through our [ISO 9001:2015] training when a light came on for most of us. We realized the certification's value when we started to understand it is more of a management tool than it is how we process things from start to finish. It's working great now with everyone on the shop floor.