According to Troy Johnson, Vice President, Operations, the company name was created because years ago the company founder wanted his firm to “grow like a Texas weed,” so he told his first customer “make the check out to Weed Instrument.” Forty years later Weed Instrument has grown to provide a complex and diverse product line of highly engineered temperature sensing, fiber optic networking and nuclear qualified instrumentation.
Weed Instrument realized that they needed to provide a well synchronized, streamlined experience for their many customers – offering the complex products that customers valued while eliminating operational production and transaction complexity that added undesirable cost to order processing and product fabrication.
The Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center (TMAC) had already helped Weed Instrument to consolidate their separate commercial, aerospace and nuclear quality systems into a single quality manual that was compliant to AS9100, Canadian quality standards and United States nuclear regulatory agency standards. The quality system drove elimination of variance and reinforced production work method standardization.
Recently, TMAC assisted Weed Instrument to build on this quality foundation through implementation of Lean Manufacturing methods throughout the organization. Beginning with Lean Principles training for every employee, Weed Instrument rapidly matured to apply value stream mapping and elimination of non-customer valued work through monthly kaizen events.
The results are impressive:
“Initially there was some internal concern about allocation of people resources,” says Johnson. “Now, we are committed to having every single employee at Weed Instrument participate in a kaizen improvement event…embracing change has truly become our company culture.”