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Mission
Providing solutions to help South Dakota manufacturers prosper and grow.
“As we continue through our Lean journey we are continuously looking for ways to improve our organization to provide a better product to our customers. The next steps will be training more of our employees in Lean, implementing a Kaizen team, and conducting a door-to-door VSM exercise through our Company. We’re extremely excited about what the possibilities hold for us. Many thanks to the MTS team for leading us at the start of this journey.”
Dakota Bodies began in Watertown, South Dakota, 20 years ago with seven employees and has grown into a 255 employee operation that develops and builds truck bodies for the service and industrial markets within the United States and Canada. Since its inception, Dakota Bodies has experienced steady growth but had been experiencing challenges meeting the market demand.
In 2014, 45,000 square feet were added to the facility to improve the production flow and provide space for additional cutting and bending equipment. A Continuous Improvement Engineer was hired to begin the process of implementing Lean Manufacturing. “We quickly learned that formal training of our supervisory team needed to occur for us to be successful,” stated Joel Grode, Director of Production. “This is when I asked a former colleague from Larson Manufacturing who they used – he told me it was South Dakota Manufacturing and Technology Solutions (MTS).
We quickly engaged with MTS who conducted an assessment of our operations along with what our goals were and we determined training on Lean 101 was what we needed to do first. We trained 40 people – supervisors, managers, key operators – over the 8-hour course and then conducted four separate on-site projects with MTS.”