The announcement of the 2024 Benchmark Enterprise Excellence (BEX) Olympics winners marks five years of innovative continuous improvement and teamwork. The BEX Olympics is a friendly, company-wide, Olympic-themed competition that challenges employees to apply Lean Sigma creatively to improve operational efficiency. In 2024, BEX reached new heights of achievement.
The BEX Olympics began in 2019, focusing on changeover improvements and substantially reducing changeover times at participating sites. The experience boosted enthusiasm for the event and expanded the number of participating teams. The organization then shifted its focus to inventory reduction. With a competitive drive, participants substantially reduced inventory, and with growing momentum, the BEX Olympics evolved, becoming a broad operational improvement competition.
The 2024 BEX Olympics
The 2024 BEX Olympics gave teams wider latitude to support corporate strategic goals by allowing sites to decide best how to support the overall company objectives. Teams reviewed manufacturing lines as a whole, as well as individual parts of each process, to identify opportunities for improvement. These reviews helped teams select the highest-impact projects, such as internalizing previously outsourced operations, using more localized suppliers, inventory disposition and reconfiguration, yield improvement, and scrap reduction, among many others. These projects resulted in packaging cost reduction, lead time improvement, inventory reduction, and cash flow improvements.
The competition spawned out of Benchmark's collaborative culture and then became a driver of the culture, creating more enthusiasm for enterprise excellence across the organization. This enthusiasm increased participation dramatically in 2024, with 13 sites and over 2,000 participants across 120 projects—far more significant than in previous years. Some projects also earned external recognition, with our Thailand site winning 2nd place in the KAIZEN™ Award Thailand 4th Edition, organized by the Kaizen Institute Thailand.
Notable projects included:
- Dramatically cutting aged WIP (Work-In-Progress), manufacturing supplies, and scrap to avoid significant financial impact
- Significantly improving first test pass yield to avoid waste and impacts from growing scrap piles
- Deep focus on employee development by conducting training programs designed to help employees immediately identify opportunities for lean practices, which led to immediate inventory and waste reduction within the year
- Bringing multiple manufacturing processes in-house to increase control and optimize processes
Winners
Every site that participated improved its processes and helped Benchmark achieve its strategic goals for the year; however, four sites excelled by presenting project results that significantly impacted business efficiency. The winners were chosen based on the sustainability and reproducibility of their approach, expert use of lean Six Sigma methodologies, and proven improvements in operational excellence in relation to the size of their site operations. Benchmark's finance department and Senior Leadership team members validated the financial impacts. Our Chief Operating Officer, Dave Valkanoff, announced the winners at Benchmark's global commercial leadership conference in March 2025. The winners of the 2024 BEX Olympics are as follows:
Penang-Waterfront – Gold
Team Penang-Waterfront achieved remarkable results with many key projects. By internalizing and improving multiple parts of packaging and handling processes, Penang-Waterfront achieved an outstanding two-thirds improvement in packaging and handling efficiency. Insourcing a paint finishing process helped reduce lead time from 1 week to 2 days and helped reduce waste. Synchronizing specific manufacturing processes to better align with customer demand improved efficiency for the customer by one-third. Penang-Waterfront even developed a new metal finishing process internally to gain control and improve quality and efficiency. This gold-winning performance represents a deep culture of excellence within the site that they have been developing for many years, leading to well-deserved recognition and a gold medal.
Suzhou – Silver
Team Suzhou attained stunning results, dramatically reducing existing and planned inventory. The team implemented multiple projects to push out shipments not yet needed by customers, cutting large amounts of inventory, saving floor space, and facilitating responsible financial management of their site. These projects significantly improved cash flow, enabling more nimble use of manufacturing resources and lowering the need for on-site stock. Suzhou has developed an impressive history of efficiency and excellence, serving as a leading example for the rest of the organization.
Tijuana & Thailand (Ayutthaya + Korat) – tied for Bronze
Team Thailand (comprised of the Ayutthaya and Korat sites) and Team Tijuana were equally matched and tied for third. To begin, Team Tijuana gave themselves an aggressive waste reduction target, focusing relentlessly on inventory, scrap, and WIP. Completing a range of projects focused on these goals significantly reduced inventory that was not immediately needed, overall waste scrap, and aged WIP, all of which consume financial resources to maintain. Tijuana proved to be a key player in the expert implementation of Lean Sigma practices.
Team Thailand also focused on waste reduction and cash flow improvement, but they took a unique approach. Team Thailand invoked grassroots efforts across the site. They planted the roots of operational excellence by implementing expansive employee training and engagement programs, all focused not only on enhancing the Lean Sigma culture but also on enhancing employee satisfaction. This approach helped them achieve results within the year and aims to make them more competitive in future competitions. Team Thailand also achieved honorable waste reduction and cash flow improvements, achieving smoother and more continuous flows in the business operation. Team Thailand stands as a testament to the power of creativity in operational efficiency!
Benchmark is proud to recognize these winning sites for their extensive contributions to the company's culture of operational excellence and our strategic objectives. They went above and beyond, leading the company in our operational excellence journey. Everyone's efforts and accomplishments allowed Benchmark to achieve its strategic goals, including improvements in operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and inventory levels. The challenge proved to be an excellent means to gamify the elements of Benchmark's mission to be our customers' trusted partner and to deliver world-class manufacturing services.
Looking Ahead
Each year, Benchmark discovers opportunities to improve the structure of the competition to better achieve its goals. Both site-level improvements and company-wide improvements are valuable. At the site level, employees look to the approaches of the other sites and begin planning for the following year. We can envision more sites using process internalization, initial test yield improvement, preemptive scrap avoidance, and process improvement (Kaizen) approaches to gain an advantage in next year's competition. However, cross-collaboration between sites is vital, allowing for even larger-scale enhancements across the organization. This coming year, Benchmark will match its most experienced Lean Six Sigma sites with sites growing in their lean journey to help them achieve value stream transformations through best practice sharing and collaboration.
The BEX Olympics have become a primary driver of a lean and efficient culture within Benchmark and will continue to be a central feature of our operational improvement in years to come.
