Operating Excellence

Whirlpool Corporation believes in doing the basics well: every day, every time. Operating Excellence starts with consumer insights and ends with consumer satisfaction. We are relentless in pursuing continuous improvement across our value chain, from product design and procurement to employee safety, cost productivity and efficient supply chain management. Operating Excellence is how we extract value through our core business processes, creating demand and earning trust every day.

Our employees continuously work to identify and remove complexity in our design processes, systems and products. Our goal is to empower our people to consistently deliver product leadership by turning consumer insights into purposeful innovation and leveraging the best technologies around the world. We design products globally and manufacture locally to increase speed to market while also delivering on regional consumer needs and preferences.

As a global company, our operations respond to a complex web of suppliers and trade customers, changing consumer preferences and constantly fluctuating demand. We relentlessly work to ensure that our supply chain remains best-in-class by continually managing our operations to do the basics well every day.

One key area of focus is our sales and operations planning process, which includes predictive analytics as well as partnering with trade customers and suppliers. We strive to balance product availability and inventory levels so that we can continue deploying cash in value-creating ways.

In 2016, we delivered more than $200 million in cost benefits through our Indesit integration in Europe and another $300 million globally through productivity initiatives. These global initiatives include improving our assembly yield, reducing waste and deploying collaborative automation, all of which reduce costs, increase availability and deliver high quality products throughout the world.