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Pride Neon Lights Up Lean

About

Pride Neon Signs has been making its customers’ visions come alive by delivering high quality, custom sign solutions for businesses, and office settings since 1947. George Menke Sr. originally launched the company with his brother-in-law as Pryde Signs. In 1949, George became the sole owner and renamed the company to Pride Neon Signs. The company remains family-owned and operated, and recently celebrated its 73rd Anniversary with its 42 employees. Pride Neon Signs has a regional reputation for innovation and quality through its service to its diverse, longstanding customer base. Its team of seasoned industry professionals excels at their craft and delight in delivering masterpieces carefully, designed, constructed, and installed to the customer’s unique specifications.

In July of 2017, Pride Neon purchased Signs Plus Graphics and expanded its product line to include vehicle graphics, wall murals, and small signage. Pride Neon prides itself in the products they deliver to their customers. From the details to the design, Pride Neon takes ownership for creating the best signs for their customers.

The Challenge

Recently, Pride Neon’s growth started to slow and the company began to face some communication and scheduling challenges. To resolve these issues, the management team decided to hire South Dakota Manufacturing & Technology Solutions, part of the MEP National Network™, to create stronger internal processes and minimize errors.
South Dakota Manufacturing & Technology has been a fantastic resource for us the last 3-1/2 years.  They have very responsive associates that have worked with our organization to improve our processes and implement lean manufacturing that has improved our internal communications and efficiencies.  They are a great organization and we have been very pleased with the service they are providing our company.
— Dick Menke, Owner

MEP's Role

South Dakota Manufacturing & Technology Solutions' work with Pride Neon has made big improvements to their operations. Take their shop floor, for example. South Dakota Manufacturing & Technology Solutions led Pride Neon through a series of projects to reorganize their shop floor to optimize their workflow. The team also worked to restructure their inventory and implemented 5S to their production floor to increase their efficiency and capacity, using Kanban as a lean framework to increase communication and transparency. Opening up communication channels and creating new processes helped keep everyone updated on employee activities and schedules. Foursquare training equipped employees with an approach for making clear-cut, well-informed decisions. Pride Neon’s team is proud of the victories they have experienced and look forward to continuing to evolve on their Lean journey.
Created May 12, 2021, Updated July 12, 2021