Engineering
Helping You Save Time & Money
Our engineering team applies lean manufacturing principles to everything from customer quotes to continuous improvement efforts to daily 5-S activities and cost reduction projects.
From the initial request for quote, we’re already looking for innovative and creative ways to minimize waste and maximize throughput. Our engineering team is responsible for the entire manufacturing process — for every part that runs through our facility — so they are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency of the entire value stream.
Your Partner from Start to Finish
Our process engineers are intimately involved all the way from the design and development stage, through the pre-production/prototype phase, to part qualification and, finally, full production. For this reason, many customers want us to help manage their projects for them.
Our goal is to simplify the overall process, enabling you to focus on your core strengths. We map out the entire value stream all the way to your assembly line, identifying improvement opportunities in the overall process. By looking at the entire process, both companies can understand what the other is doing. Potential duplication can be eliminated, and we’re able to identify operations that might be more cost-effectively performed at Mid-States Aluminum or at your facility.
Often, our aluminum extrusions are part of a larger assembly containing hundreds of other components. Projects that require several different aluminum extrusion profiles — in several different lengths, configurations and finishes, with a variety of production tooling required — can be very difficult to manage. We have adapted our organizational structure to be able to quickly and effectively respond to a wide range of customer demands, consistent with our lean manufacturing principles.
For projects that would be ordered in smaller quantities with hundreds of variations, the purchasing and order-entry functions can create a process bottleneck. To simplify this, we work to coordinate our information systems with yours in a way that minimizes excessive manual data entry, while facilitating clear communication and maintaining accuracy and system integrity.
Engineering at a Glance
- Aluminum extrusion design development
- Light-weighting and cost-optimization assistance
- Value Analysis / Value Engineering (VAVE) support
- Builds of prototypes and development parts
- Development of production process for high-volume parts
- Utilization of Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) process and documentation