Small business flourishes with Honeywell coaching

Honeywell was awarded the DOE Small Business “Mentor of the Year” Award for helping a small Kansas-based machining and assembly vendor, Ultra-Tech Aerospace (UTA), with two aggressive goals – expand capabilities to include on-site welding and utilize LEAN/Six Sigma principles to improve capacity of the overall operations.

 Honeywell welding experts coached UTA staff as they planned, designed, purchased, installed, hired, trained and launched a welding department from scratch. What started as a catch-all area for stored materials at UTA is now a 4-booth welding department staffed with 3 welders. The space is rapidly expanding due to an influx of new work. Since launching the department in June 2017, UTA has awarded 9 welding jobs valued at $1.1M (all Federal contracts).

 Lean experts with broad industry experience, training and certification assisted UTA on their journey of becoming a LEAN machine and assembly shop. Not only was the cycle time on the targeted family of parts reduced by 15 percent but the scrap percentage was reduced from 12 percent to 1.1 percent.

 With Honeywell’s coaching, UTA has become a self-sufficient, LEAN enterprise with continuous improvement as a core cultural element.