What is ACE™?
ACE™ (Achieving Competitive Excellence) is an Operating System used in the UTC corporation.
The ACE ™ Operating System is built on the foundations of the Kaizen and TQM philosophy.
ACE™ w Pratt & Whitney Kalisz
The ACE ™ Operating System engages our employees in improving the quality of our products and and has an impact on the way our company works at every organizational level. The cyclical training of our employees on ACE ™ tools is an important element of it. Every day we use 14 ACE ™ tools, the use of each of them is strictly defined: process improvement, loss elimination, identification and solving problems, decision making, benchmarking.
Thanks to the ACE ™ Operating System, we are able to efficiently:
- define and meet customer (external and internal) expectations,
- define, improve and standardize our processes,
- identify and solve current problems,
- reduce the production cycle,
- carry out preventive actions,
- visualize the workplaces.
In our work, we use commonly known techniques, such as:
- process mapping
- brainstorm
- 5x Whys
- Ishikawa diagrams (cause-and-effect diagram))
- Pareto chart
- ProSteer
- Decision Matrices
- Poka Yoke
- Kanban
The first Kaizen workshops took place back in 1996.
The introduction of the Kaizen tool has contributed, among other things, to optimal line alignment, reduced batch size, reduced waiting time for tools, reduced machine failure rate and visualization of workstations. In 1999 a separate unit was established to coordinate the implementation of the ACE ™ Continuous Improvement Program at PWK.