When Scott Morey arrived at the plateau, he realized what helped his company grow wouldn’t take it any higher.
After exponential growth, The Morey Corp. wasn’t quite the same company that Morey’s grandfather founded in a basement in 1934. While that growth was great, it also revealed the inefficiencies of old systems.
“The first signs that you have to do something different is when systems and processes and people that were performing well … start to crack,” says Morey, the third-generation president and CEO of the electronic manufacturing services provider. “Problems that you didn’t have before because they were just handled start to crop up again. A lot of it is just because the volume of work that needs to be addressed changes. The demands of customers have a tendency to become greater. The speed at which we need to operate increases and everything just has to move to another level of performance.”
The manufacturing processes that Morey Corp. developed for smaller-scale operations weren’t keeping up with its growth. The company was committed to keeping manufacturing operations in the U.S. instead of outsourcing overseas. It was also planning to expand beyond original equipment manufacturer services by offering products directly to end-users.
But the company was stuck.
“We recognized that, given the tools and the expertise that we had developed over time, we had gotten about as good as we could get,” Morey says. “We just were not making the types of improvements — particularly in quality — that we believed we needed to make to remain a world-class manufacturing company.”
To be able to scale to growth and compete in the global market, Morey knew he had to slim down the inefficiencies and improve quality. He found the perfect match for the company’s continuous improvement philosophies — not to mention an expanded toolbox of methods — in lean.
“When you’re providing any good or service, the fundamental objective is to do it as quickly and efficiently as you possibly can, at the highest quality,” he says. “The key to that is eliminating waste, eliminating rework, eliminating anything that doesn’t bring value to the process.”
