Circles of Excellence
Management involvement begins on the working floor with empowerment of our assembly workers and technicians through feed back upward of problems, recommendations, and advice. We have organized “Circles of Excellence” and encourage direct communications with the Manufacturing Manager and other senior managers.

Project Management
Each job is assigned a Project Manager who is responsible to the customer for all aspects of a job from job definition to shipment, for quality, management and status reporting, and to VRI Management for customer satisfaction. The Project Engineer is the first line point of contact with the customer. He is responsible for interpretation of customer documentation during the initial project review, preparation of assembly procedures/manuals, the establishment of inspection and testing requirements, tracking job status, and resolving problems. His responsibility ends at final packaging and shipping. VRI Project Managers are carefully screened and reflect a high level of experience and education in all manufacturing disciplines.

Automated Management Tools
Enterprise Management at VRI is executed using the “Vantage Manufacturing Management System” The Vantage system includes modules for Material Procurement, Inventory Control, Production Control, Financial Tracking, Data Management, Quality Assurance, Returned Material Control, and Scheduling.

Vantage is a relational database that ties all of this information together for job visibility and coordination between functions. Some of the activities include: generation of Bills of Material by engineering from customer lists, preparation of purchase orders, and tracking of purchase receipts to specific kits/jobs. Job travelers with reference procedures are also prepared in the system. Labor and material costs are tracked to identify and track cost drivers for our Lean Manufacturing initiatives.

Lean Manufacturing
Lean Manufacturing has been defined as “A systematic approach to identifying and eliminating non-value added activities through continuous improvement of processes.” This objective must be achieved with no reduction in the quality of work delivered. At VRI Lean Manufacturing is seen as the means to competitive pricing and lowering costs to our customers.

Lean Manufacturing is practiced on a daily basis at VRI in the following activities: just-in-time procurement, avoiding over ordering, sharing overhead functions, outsourcing, cross training, identifying value added verses nice-to-have, point of use stocking, streamlined inventory control, combining assembly steps, quality and workmanship training, automating labor intensive processes, and moving quality upstream to eliminate wasteful rework, to name a few.