Honoring excellence: improving businesses improve Indiana. Winners of this year's BKD Indiana Excellence Awards.

• Position: Cover Story

EXCELLENCE AND QUALITY improvement are nothing new at Alfe Heat Treating. The organization has for years had a formal and comprehensive plan to continually improve, and it's helped Alfe weather changing trends in the automotive industry.

Alfe's Continuous Quality Improvement Plan, or CQIP for short, took home top honors in this year's BKD Indiana Excellence Awards. The annual awards program which announced this year's winners in October--recognizes business excellence, rewarding organizations for doing better no matter what their starting point. The awards are presented in five categories by title sponsor BKD, a CPA and advisory firm, along with sponsors National City Bank and Indiana Business magazine. From the gold winners in the five categories, an overall winner is selected. This year that winner was Alfe Heat Treating's Wabash Division.

"Alfe Heat Treating is a commercial heat treater of aluminum products, predominantly automotive components," says general manager Dan Andersen. "We do it as a value-added manufacturing process." In order to stay a leader in the heat-treating business, Alfe uses its CQIP, "a defined process that details the steps we take to review our key measures, analyze results, draw conclusions and identify improvement opportunities," he says.

"Customer satisfaction was one of our goals," says quality assurance manager Steve Burke. The company chose to act on customer requests to add email capabilities covering product certification and such shipping documentation as bills of lading. "We did implement that and received positive feedback on customer surveys," Burke says.

The company also sought to make the workplace safer and set out to win the Indiana Bureau of Safety Education and Training's INSHARP (Indiana Safety Health Award Recognition Program) award. Among its actions was the installation of safety devices at loading docks to prevent trucks from accidentally moving while being loaded or unloaded. Alfe is the only privately held Indiana company to earn the INSHARP designation.

Another goal involved gaining better control of time and temperature in the heat-treating process, which also required adding new equipment. "We were able to reduce rework and almost eliminate scrap," Burke says.

Impressive as its achievements have been, the most important thing is that the CQIP process never ends, Andersen says. After briefly basking in the honor of winning the overall BKD Indiana Excellence Award, Alfe went back to work, following "the exact same planning process for 2006," he says. "We are continuing down the same path."

SERVICE

Before being called back to the stage as the overall BKD Indiana Excellence Award winner, Alfe Heat Treating collected the gold trophy in the service category Taking home the silver award was book publisher AuthorHouse of Bloomington. AuthorHouse established its Tender Loving Care program to meet the growing needs of its current and potential client base. The program simplified the publishing process by eliminating seven of AuthorHouse's 30 stages of development, allowed direct communication between authors and book designers, and brought together designers and consultants onto new teams. Under the program, the average production time has been trimmed from six months to four, costs have been reduced and satisfied clients are now generating referrals at a rate of 97 percent, up from 68 percent.

Bronze winner Industrial Contractors, an Evansville-based general contractor, was healthy but sought continuous improvement in order to stay ahead of industry changes and prepare...