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With Euraka Winning Ways
ATAC helps companies create growth strategies

Industry                                                                               
HVAC Filtration

Company City
Robertsdale     

Company State
Alabama                                             

Company Name                                                                     
Quality filters Inc.s         

Project/Activity Year
Growth Management/ 2008

Company Profile
Quality Filters manufactures a full line of products for the HVAC and paint booth filtration industries. The company has grown over its more than 26-year history from a small manufacturing firm with a limited line of pleated filters to a competitive presence offering a large array of HVAC, gas phase and paint filtration products nationwide.


Situation
“We are a very innovative company with a lot of ideas,” said Rich Scott, company president. “Our employees have always strived to devise new and better ways to meet customer demands and to keep our company competitive. Our challenge as a small company, though, was organizing those efforts.

Solution
To help small and mid-sized manufacturers grow top-line sales, the Alabama Technology Network (ATN) has partnered with the Eureka! Ranch, a leading innovation group that has helped companies like Nike, American Express, and Walt Disney to generate business-building ideas.
Auburn Technical Assistance Center (ATAC), the ATN center at Auburn University, has aligned with Quality Filters Inc. of Robertsdale, Ala., where ATAC’s assistance in implementing Eureka! Winning Ways has helped this 26-year-old firm expand into a profitable niche market that presently accounts for about 15 percent of the company’s sales and shows a potential for doubling over the next few months. Eureka! Winning Ways gave the company a very effective way to get our ideas organized, evaluate them, and conduct the necessary market research to better guarantee success. It also gave us the momentum to launch and sustain the program through implementation.

Results

The ATN-Eureka! Ranch partnership is focused on helping companies generate ideas for: Creating more effective marketing messages; capturing new customers or markets; and generating ideas for new or improved products, services or business models.

“Eureka! Winning Ways is a powerful process for Alabama manufacturers who need to create and execute measurably smarter choices for growth,” said ATAC’s David Mixson, who is one of only two Eureka Growth Coaches in the ATN who trained under EWW founder Doug Hall.
Over some three months time, Mixson guided and coached Quality Filters through EWW. The effort now has progressed to the point where the company is seeing measurable results.

Quality Filters is presently installing new manufacturing equipment to the tune of a more than $23,000 investment to meet customer demands in its new growth area, according to Scott.

“We have actually had to slow down sales in this market so that we can catch up,” Scott said.

The company launched its EWW initiative largely to evaluate an idea that there was a demand for its product among environmentally conscious homeowners.

“We thought there was growth potential in the ‘green’ market,” Scott said. “We took that idea through the Eureka! Winning Ways process, grading it against some pretty stringent criteria, actively conducting organized research on the market, through actually launching the idea into a specialty product line.”

The result: Quality Filters has captured a previously un-tapped Internet sales base through which it markets custom air quality filters to residential customers.

“This is a market segment valued at some $1 billion nationally,” Scott said. “Eureka! Winning Ways has helped us capture a portion of that market for our business in a significant volume.”

Quality Filters has operated as a Lean enterprise for the past six years, Scott adds. Lean, a system based on eliminating or removing waste and non-value-added activities from a process, typically frees up additional production capacity within manufacturing operations.

“I can’t say being a company that is implementing Lean is responsible solely for our being able to expand into this new market, but the flexibility afforded to us through Lean certainly has been a factor in our being able to effectively exploit it,” Scott said.

Scott agrees that EWW is a valuable complement to Lean that offers companies a truly effective process for planning and implementing growth strategies that capitalize on the benefits they achieve through Lean.

“I definitely would recommend Eureka! Winning Ways – particularly for a mature company looking for new ideas,” Scott said.
To learn more about Quality Filters, visit its web site at www.qualityfilters.com. Learn more about Eureka! Winning Ways and other continuous improvement programs by visiting the ATAC web site at www.auburnworks.org.

EDITOR’S POST SCRIPT: Quality Filters Inc. of Robertsdale, Ala. also is working with Auburn University in the area of attaining guidance in protecting its intellectual property rights.

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“This is a market segment valued at some $1 billion nationally,” Scott said. “Eureka! Winning Ways has helped us capture a portion of that market for our business in a significant volume.”