2024 AME Excellence Award Winners: Kaas Tailored and Flex Mechanical Zhuhai
Photos by: The Association for Manufacturing Excellence and Robb Cohen Photography & Video
The Association for Manufacturing Excellence is honored to highlight the 2024 winners of the AME Excellence Award.
The AME Excellence Award is a prestigious program that recognizes and honors organizations demonstrating enterprise-wide continuous improvement, the effective application of lean practices, and a strong commitment to operational excellence. This award also honors companies that actively engage and empower their workforce in pursuit of these goals. The award's criteria outline a lean systems model for achieving enterprise excellence. Aligned with AME’s mission to inspire a commitment to enterprise excellence, this award identifies best practices to be shared with fellow AME members.
This year's recipients have demonstrated what it truly means to strive for world-class performance and manufacturing excellence while fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration and continuous learning. Their journeys inspire us all to reach for higher standards.
The 2024 AME Excellence Awards were presented by Michael Bremer, AME’s vice president of the AME Excellence Awards, and Ryan Zeng, AME’s executive director of the Seattle Consortium, at the AME Atlanta 2024 International Conference in October.
2024 AME Excellence Award Winner: Flex China
Liming Peng and YW Chan with Flex Mechanical Zhuhai
Photo by: Robb Cohen Photography & Video
AME is excited to spotlight Flex Mechanical in Zhuhai, China as an outstanding example of manufacturing excellence and continuous improvement. Flex, an acclaimed manufacturing partner worldwide, proudly presented their progress and improvement earlier this year.
Karen Jiao, general manager at Flex, shared that this two-year journey has delivered numerous benefits for their organization, including:
- Enhanced efficiency: The insights and recommendations from AME helped Flex streamline processes, reduce waste and improve productivity.
- Improved profit margins: Flex’s focus on automation, standardization and project-driven growth contributed directly to financial gains.
- Strategic alignment: The assessments gave Flex a roadmap to refine their long-term strategy and align it with excellence principles.
- Empowered teams: Through training and collaboration, Flex’s teams have become more engaged, proactive and capable of driving improvements independently.
- Cross-industry learning: Benchmarking with Littlefuse and participating in the AME Atlanta 2024 Conference broadened Flex’s perspectives and brought fresh inspiration.
“The 40+ hours of training provided by [the AME] team ensured our employees understood the assessment criteria, could identify gaps and leveraged existing strengths effectively,” Jiao shared. “We deeply appreciate the time, effort and resources AME dedicated from the assessments to the benchmarking opportunities and the Atlanta Conference – such an incredible experience!”
See Flex Mechanical Zhuhai’s story come to life. Watch the Flex AME Excellence Award video.
About Flex
Flex is the advanced end-to-end manufacturing partner of choice, helping market-leading brands across a diverse set of industries design, build, deliver and manage products that improve the world. Through the collective strength of a global workforce across 30 countries, and responsible, sustainable operations, Flex supports its customers’ entire product lifecycles with leading design and engineering, supply chain, manufacturing, post production and post-sale capabilities in every major region. For more information about Flex, visit flex.com.
Contact Information
Jessica Anderson | Director Corporate Integrated Marketing and Communications, Flex
YW Chan | Plant Manager, Flex
Karen Jiao | General Manager, Flex
Liming Peng | Director Program and Engineering, Flex
Jeff Kaas and Tucker Kaas with Kaas Tailored
Photo by: The Association for Manufacturing Excellence
AME is thrilled to showcase Kaas Tailored, a manufacturing facility located in Mukilteo, Washington, as an exemplary leader in highly effective improvement practices. Kaas Tailored believes in performing high-quality work with minimal waste, creating space for collaboration and innovation, and promoting deep learning so their workforce and clients can reach their full potential.
“Having the AME assessors visit our site was the best learning experience our team has ever had. Their exceptional knowledge and the thoughtful way they asked questions made the process incredibly impactful. They’ve given us invaluable input and the opportunity to approach our journey with a fresh perspective and renewed energy,” shared Jeff Kaas, president of Kaas Tailored.
About Kaas Tailored
Kaas Tailored is a manufacturing facility located in Mukilteo, Washington. Its workplace is one of joy and learning, committed to developing people through a culture of continuous improvement. To fund these efforts, the company produces high-quality upholstered goods and develops, integrates and builds design services for line-minded customers. For more information about Kaas Tailored and its award-winning achievements, products and services, visit https://kaastailored.com/.
Contact Information
Jeff Kaas | President, Kaas Tailored
Tucker Kaas | Learning and Development Manager, Kaas Tailored
Celebrate excellence: Benchmark, improve, and achieve the AME Excellence Award
Join us in celebrating these organizations for their dedication to improving not just their operations, but the customers they serve. Excellence is not a single destination point — it’s a continuous journey.
AME uses the AME Lean Sensei® that allows AME members to benchmark their organization against distinguished AME Excellence Award recipient companies. AME Excellence Award recipients operate at exceptional levels of performance, setting a high bar for achieving success in the pursuit of operational excellence. If you are interested in joining this distinguished group of recipients, the AME Lean Sensei® will help you see if you’re ready to apply.
Learn more about how your organization can achieve a higher degree of operational excellence. Explore the AME Excellence Award program.
