Pop quiz—what is Current’s largest site by employee count? It may be surprising, as you won’t find it in Cleveland or Boston or even Hendersonville, NC. You’ll have to head much farther south, all the way to the other side of the US/Mexico border. Nestled in a small industrial city, just a few miles from the banks of the Rio Grande, sits Current’s Acuña facility. Roughly 1/3 of all Current employees call Acuña home, and the site is responsible for manufacturing the bulk of our indoor products for retail and commercial office applications, as well as Specialty products like traffic signals.

Once products are assembled in Acuña, they are loaded onto trucks to make the short journey over the border to our Del Rio, TX distribution center—it’s not uncommon to see 15 of these trucks crossing the border in a single day. That high volume of product movement is leading to a renewed focus on upgrading our Supply Chain capabilities in Acuña. Using the same playbook established by our “Brilliant” team in Hendersonville, we recently kicked off a new initiative to transform Acuña into Current’s next Intelligent Factory.

So what does it take to create a truly Intelligent Factory? We put this exact question to Joe Cenin, Current’s GM of Global Supply Chain. “An Intelligent Factory is a plant that runs incredibly efficiently and maintains the absolute highest levels of service to our customers,” Joe explained. “Similar to our Hendersonville efforts in recent years, we are beginning to implement new tools to improve our Acuña operations, and there are two big ingredients to a successful transformation—lean manufacturing and digital optimization.”

Planned lean manufacturing improvements will include things like new standardized work processes, additional GEMBA walks and status boards, better parts coordination with vendors, an improved KanBan system and new replenishment routes for bin refills, and more frequent audits and action planning sessions. Digital enhancements will include expanding and updating to a more modern MES system to improve the fixture assembly process and drive additional insights and operational improvements.

One of the team’s most ambitious goals involves transforming Acuña into a “capable-to-promise” operation. Basically, it means reframing our digital processing to shift Current from a reactive model where customers inquire about delivery dates, and we search through disparate systems and teams to provide answers that often change and cause frustration, to a more streamlined system of information that allows us to proactively issue customers a confirmed delivery date when they place the order. If you’ve ever ordered anything from Amazon and seen a guaranteed delivery date, it’s roughly the same concept.

“Our most important goal here in Acuña is to improve the customer experience,” said Becky Hernandez, Plant Manager. “Our team is committed to improving service levels and supporting commercial growth as part of this Intelligent Factory journey, and we are excited to get started.”

We will continue chronicling the Acuña Intelligent Factory initiative over the next few months, so be on the lookout for future stories in What’s the Current and on our MyCurrent Intranet site. Check out additional photos and videos of the Acuña plant.