Office and healthcare furniture manufacturer OFS Brands practices what it calls one-piece flow manufacturing, which is an emphasis on single-piece manufacturing over batch production, according to Jeff Eckert, senior vice president of the Huntingburg, IN-based company .
âOne-piece flow is designing a system so that no material is put in what they call WIP (work in process) until there is an order for it,â says Mike Wagner, senior vice president of sales and marketing. âThe value of one-piece flow is the one-to-one ratio. The customer orders it by the part. We are producing one part for the customerâs order all the way through to the process where they (the final product) get assembled, in a one-piece to one-piece ratio. So everything is built to order....Anything that is produced domestically long-term, I think you have to have a system set up and products that are designed to have a wide variety of custom capabilities.â
Environmental stewardship also plays a role in the companyâs operations. OFS owns nearly 10,000 acres of forestland throughout southern Indiana and Kentucky, and is a member of the American Tree Farm Assn. The company also offers products that are FSC-certified and some core that is formaldehyde-free.
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