Our company has been associated with the Mid Willamette High Performance Consortia for the past 5 years. We have found the consortia to be of great value to our company, employees, and operations. Early in our participation, we hosted a learning tour and had over 20 people from other consortia businesses come to our site for a full day. We selected 3 areas of our operations that needed improvement; purchasing, order fulfillment, and heavy duty wiper arm assembly. During this tour , the consortia contributed greatly in brain storming and implementing suggestions for improvement in all areas. The consortia sponsors various training courses during the year which have helped our people learn lean manufacturing principals, including kaizen, process mapping, and 5s events. In summary, our association with the consortia has been valuable throughout our organization. There is a high level of professionalism , knowledge, and experience in the group, we appreciate receiving the value and benefit from our participation.