Receiving Honors and Actionable Feedback Through Top Shops

After poring over the vast amount of data gathered from the annual Top Shops benchmarking program’s survey takers, Modern Machine Shop’s editorial team identified honorees that set themselves apart across the survey’s four individual categories: machining technology, business strategies, shopfloor practices and human resources.

The survey reveals the best of the best in modern manufacturing and the highest caliber of machine shops in the U.S. For example, HR honoree Northeast Tool & Manufacturing recognized the difficulty in attracting skilled labor amidst an industry-wide shortage, so this shop began to partner with organizations across the country to attract talent while also covering any relocation costs and subsidizing travel to and from its facility for qualifying employees.

For some shops, being forward-thinking means making strategic adjustments as business conditions change, as is the case with the story of business strategies honoree Manda Machine. This shop used to take on as much work as it could find, but it has since shifted to only accepting jobs that are low quantity, high quality and value-added, or as operations manager Todd Ellard puts it, jobs that give him “the warm fuzzies.” Senior editor Julia Hider describes what that process looks like in her feature story on Manda Machine.

Related, the advanced machining technology on display at machining technology honoree Stock Drive Products / Sterling Instrument (SDP/SI) gave Modern Machine Shop’s editorial team “the warm fuzzies.” This two-time Top Shops honoree invests anywhere from $1 million to $1.5 million in new machine tools and technology annually, rotating out its old equipment and bringing in newer machines, which includes a slew of automation solutions and more than 300 machine tools.

Investments in automation have enabled shopfloor practices honoree Pro Products Inc. to double its sales since investing in its first robot arm in 2014. This shop’s production labor costs have dropped as much as 70% since that time, allowing the company to pay its machinists more and be more competitive in quoting.

These shops not only represent the highest caliber of machining facilities in the U.S. but also the value of a benchmarking program that provides tangible and useful data for participants.

“The recognition component of Top Shops gets a lot of play as we are always happy to highlight honorees and learn more about them,” says Jan Shafer, director of market research at Gardner Intelligence, leaders of the annual Top Shops survey. “We are big fans of Top Shop’s benchmarking component, too. Time and again we hear that Top Shops benchmarking data are not just nice to know but useful. 

Reporting the distribution of individual responses shows ‘how high is up.’ Having a means for setting performance goals helps rally the organization, thereby increasing the odds of achieving them. Bottom line, participating shops always get a lot of mileage out of Top Shops!”