Assembly - November 2008 - (Page 24) 2008 Assembly Plant of the Year About the Award The ASSEMBLY magazine “Assembly Plant of the Year” award was initiated in i 2004 to showcase world-class production facilities in America, and the people, products and processes that make them successful. All manufacturers that p assemble products in the United States are invited to nominate their plants. a The goal of the award is to identify a state-of-the-art facility that has applied world-class processes to reduce production cost, increase productivity, w shorten time to market or improve product quality. s An official nomination form was printed in several issues of ASSEMBLY earlier this year; in addition, an online version appeared on the magazine’s e Web W site. Nominations were received from a diverse group of manufacturers that t reflect the magazine’s demographics. All nominees were evaluated by a group of independent experts and by ASSEMBLY’s editorial staff, based on the following criteria: A Have assembly processes been improved through the use of new t technology? Has the plant improved its performance by making more effective use o of existing technology? Has the plant taken steps to reduce production costs? Have new or improved assembly processes resulted in increased p productivity? Has the plant used assembly improvements to reduce time to market? Has the plant boosted bottom-line profits and competitive advantage? Did operators play a role in the successful implementation of new a assembly strategies? Has a product been effectively designed for efficient assembly? Has the plant attempted to protect the environment and conserve n natural resources? As winner of the fifth annual Assembly Plant of the Year competition, the IBM HighEnd E Server Plant (Poughkeepsie, NY) received an engraved crystal award (top left) and a commemorative banner (bottom) during a special presentation at the plant. Previous recipients of the Assembly Plant of the Year award were Schneider Electric/Square D (Lexington, KY); Lear Corp. (Montgomery, AL); Xerox E Corp. (Webster, NY); and Kenworth Truck Co. (Renton, WA). Nomination C forms for the 2009 Assembly Plant of the Year award will be available early f next n year at www.assemblymag.com. and Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, IL), respectively. During last summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing, China, the local weather bureau used a Poughkeepsie-built IBM System p575 to aid in weather forecasting and air-quality control. And, the IBM Deep Blue machine that beat worldchampion Gary Kasparov in a highly publicized chess match back in 1997 was manufactured in Poughkeepsie. Earlier this year, IBM introduced three new products that are assembled in the plant: The System z10 mainframe was designed from the ground up to dramatically increase data center efficiency by significantly improving performance, while reducing power, cooling costs and floor space requirements. It is up to 50 percent faster than its predecessor, the z9, and offers up to 70 percent more capacity. The Power 575 supercomputer helps end users tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems in fields such as aerospace, energy and weather modeling. It uses a unique copper- plumbed water-cooling system and is equipped with IBM’s POWER6 chip, the world’s fastest microprocessor. The Hydro-Cluster offers nearly five times the performance and more than three times the energy efficiency of its predecessor. The Power 595 UNIX enterprise server is designed to simplify data center infrastructure and reduce operating costs through server consolidation, easier systems management and energy savings. It ranks as the world’s fastest UNIX system. Unlike the Power 24 ASSEMBLY / November 2008 www.assemblymag.com http://www.assemblymag.com http://www.assemblymag.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.