The Shingo Prize has symbolized a successful lean journey for North American manufacturers since 1988. Named after Japanese industrial engineer Shingeo Shingo – who helped create the Toyota Production System – the award is often dubbed the “Pulitzer of engineering” because of its lofty standards and coveted nature.

Early in the prize’s history, the United States dominated. From 1989 to 1995, U.S. businesses claimed 22 of the 23 top prizes awarded for operational excellence. That dominance has dwindled in recent years. Companies from Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica have crept onto the scene and taken prizes from the Americans.

This year, U.S. companies Metalworks/Great Openings of Ludington, Mich., and ZF Lemforder Corp., based in Tuscaloosa, Ala., earned top prizes. And the United States was the only nation to earn silver and bronze medallions.

But four of the top six prizes in 2008 went to four companies in Mexico and Costa Rica. In 2007, seven of the 12 top prize honorees were based in Mexico, as well.

Doug McCaig, managing director of Hamilton Cornell Associates in Hingham, Mass., says the Shingo Prize has too many tedious requirements – along with application fees of between $7,000 and $11,000 for large businesses – for many companies to want to pursue. “I’m not sure where the driver is for companies in the United States to go for the prize,” he says. “It is not like the Shingo board searches them out.”

But while some companies might not want to go through the Shingo application process, they might at least want to benefit from measuring their operations against the award’s criteria, which take leadership and innovation into heavier consideration than most lean guidelines. Hamilton Cornell has taken that criteria and developed a self-assessment spider graph that guides clients through the Shingo criteria.

“[We] will help clients achieve Shingo certification if they want,” McCaig says. “But we will use the Shingo criteria to help drive business.”

But whether manufacturers ultimately choose to compete for the Shingo, Dwight Bowen, a Pennsylvania-based independent lean consultant, suggests American manufacturers still don’t see an overall need to engrain a waste-reducing culture into their operations as urgently as do manufacturers in other nations. 

“The need has to come from within – there has to be that perception of need,” Bowen says. “It is a perceived need that is slowly coming on with the ‘r’ word [recession] coming into our vocabulary.”

Bowen has more than 25 years of experience and believes companies do not consider lean manufacturing until absolutely necessary because change can be difficult.

But for U.S. manufacturers to survive in the future, business leaders will have to lose what he describes as “arrogance” when it comes to change and make the necessary changes to their cultures. “You need to have clarification and communication; without that, you don’t win,” Bowen adds. “We need to be tough on the process and nice to the people [operating the processes].”