Assembly - November 2008 - (Page 23) “We’re also partnering with our real estate teams to recognize savings with lighting options, temperature and humidity specifications, and other green techniques,” adds King. “In addition, we’re examining inbound logistics for opportunities to recycle packaging. We also reuse packaging on outbound logistics, which we recover from the field for domestic reuse.” The plant is currently implementing a major recycling initiative and conducting a full waste audit that encompasses materials such as bubble wrap, electrostatic discharge (ESD) bags, foam inserts and shrink wrap, in addition to traditional forms of paper and plastic. Employees are encouraged to participate in “lunch and learn” sessions where they discuss various green initiatives. The ISO 14001 and ISO 9001:2000 certified facility is also a leader when it comes to lean manufacturing activities. By optimizing production processes through lean techniques such as 5S, kaizen and visual systems, King and his advanced manufacturing sciences team have saved IBM more than $7 million over the last two years. Because of those lean and green efforts, the Poughkeepsie facility is the recipient of ASSEMBLY magazine’s fifth annual Assembly Plant of the Year award. The plant has also achieved impressive results addressing the unique challenges of high-mix, lowvolume assembly, such as supply chain management. Complex Products Despite the weak U.S. economy, IBM had a strong first half in 2008. In fact, revenues were up 13 percent in the 2nd quarter. Samuel Palmisano, IBM’s president and CEO, attributed much of that growth to the products that are assembled at the Poughkeepsie plant. The plant is considered to be the crown jewel of IBM because the products built there are some of the biggest profit producers in the company. The 2008 Assembly Plant of the Year is responsible for developing and manufacturing the world’s most complex enterprise servers, which are used extensively for applications in science, industry, government and academia. Products such as System z and Power Systems are used by companies around the world to maintain and process vast amounts of data. Many of those high-end servers are located in the back offices of airlines, banks, brokerage firms, car rental companies, casinos, credit card issuers, government agencies, hospitals, hotel chains, insurance companies, retailers, universities and research laboratories. During the last five decades, the Poughkeepsie plant has built thousands of mainframes and servers. Many of them rank among the fastest and most powerful computers in the world. Earlier this year, the plant made history when it assembled the world’s fastest computer for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, NM). The Roadrunner supercomputer was the first system in the world to break a milestone known as a petaflop—the ability to calculate 1 quadrillion operations every second. The computer packs the power of 100,000 laptops—a stack 1.5 miles high—and is more than three times faster than the nearest non-IBM computer. Assemblers in Poughkeepsie also built the second- and thirdfastest supercomputers in the world, which are housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, CA) Although many companies in the computer industry have outsourced hardware production, IBM still chooses to build its high-end servers in-house as a strategic business initiative. This multichip module is the processing engine that powers the System z10. www.assemblymag.com November 2008 / ASSE M B LY 23 http://www.assemblymag.com
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