A Culture Change at Ahaus: Raising the Bar

Ahaus recently went through a self-imposed culture change. We wanted to make sure we hadn’t lost sight of why we do what we do, and that we were capable of delivering to our customers what we had been promising. It’s not that we weren’t already getting things done on time, on budget and with our customers’ expectations as priority number one. After all, we had an on-time delivery goal of 93 percent —already an impressive earmark in the automation equipment industry. But we wanted to take our business to a whole new level of high performance, going beyond our existing, already high standards. We wanted to create a culture around a promise: A high-value commitment to stellar workmanship, strong customer relationships, and sound machine and automation equipment design.

Specifically, we will be focusing on the following areas for improvement:

• Commitment
• Deliver on what has been promised.
• Responsiveness
• Have a sense of urgency in everything that is done.
• Ownership
• Take the initiative to do things right, resolve issues, and improve the process.
• Raising the Bar

In addition to a culture change and focus shift, we raised our on-time delivery goal from 93 to 97 percent, and we created an internal task force to ensure all pressing issues were being addressed on a consistent basis. From improving engineering timing to refining the order review and priority assessment processes, our overall performance as a company is being tracked and aligned for significant advancement.