The Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing was awarded to six manufacturing plants. Named after Shigeo Shingo, one of the creators of the Toyota Production System, the award honors those involved in lean manufacturing. The winners are:

  • Baxter Healthcare Corp.'s Renal Div. (Mountain Home, AR) for reducing lead time by 84% and improving on-time delivery to more than 99%.
  • Benteler Automotive's Tubular Products Div. (Grand Rapids, MI) for reducing scrap by 40% and increasing inventory turns, on-time delivery and productivity.
  • Ford Motor's Essex Engine Plant (Windsor, Ontario, Canada) for achieving 100% on-time delivery and improving first-time-through quality by 32% from 1996 to 2000.
  • Ford's Ohio assembly plant (Avon Lake, OH) for achieving a warranty improvement of 22% on its Econoline vehicle and a 39% improvement in a "things gone wrong" customer quality survey on the Villager/Quest automobile.
  • Freundeberg-NOK's plant (Cleveland, GA) for reducing scrap by 54%, increasing productivity by 27% and reducing parts per million rejection rates by 97%.
  • Johnson Controls Automotive Systems Group's plant (Greenfield, OH) for achieving 98% machine utilization, averaging more than 100 inventory turns over a three-year period and reducing scrap as a percent of sales to less than 1%.