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Lean Manufacturing at Hydro Engineering, Inc.

Since April of 2002 Hydro Engineering, Inc. has been progressing through a “Lean Thinking” overhaul of our company. In manufacturing circles Lean Thinking is a process to review all aspects of your business. Starting with marketing, product development, process development, sales, accounting, purchasing, inventory, fabrication, assembly, testing, packaging, shipment, service, and last…warranty administration with one goal in mind, to eliminate anything that doesn’t bring value to the customer.

Each process (department) within our company is reviewed and improved on a scheduled basis making ongoing changes “On the Fly” as a simple matter of course.

A customer may never notice the changes in Hydro Engineering and its products, some are subtle and others are quite noticeable. What does it mean to you?

• Information flowing to our customers is more accurate; pricing, specifications, owners manuals, support documentation and much more.

• Instead of building an inventory of machines that may or may not reflect what the customer wants, every machine is built on a custom order basis. We call this “Single Piece Flow”. This allows you to “Have it Your Way” order what you want and receive exactly what you ordered.

• Single piece flow allows us to make changes on the fly and when a problem is identified it can be easily corrected. Quality is dramatically improved.

• Sales prices are kept low in several ways; inventory carrying costs and re-work of outdated inventory are eliminated, raw materials and parts are ordered only as needed reducing inventory, testing procedures are more thorough and exacting and last but not least un-required administration steps are eliminated.

• Documentation of each step in the process from order to warranty insures that every machine/order is handled with you…the customer, in mind.

Relationships with key suppliers are forged bringing them closer to Hydro Engineering. By helping them understand the Lean Thinking process we can obtain more frequent deliveries just when they are required. This further reduces our costs and provides additional savings to you.

We are very proud of the improvements we have made and the momentum building within our company and its customer base. During the first year our ability to produce equipment increased by 50% and then another 30% the following year. It continues at this pace to this day.

We invite you to experience the changes in Hydro Engineering Inc. Please visit us to place your next order and allow us to give you a factory tour showing how it will be processed and filled.

We’re very excited about the future and hope you will be part of it.