As a grease manufacturer, we can borrow Shakespeare’s existential ponderings …“To be or not to be?”… and adapt it to our own reality: "To be a grease plant or a greasy plant?"
According to our mission statement: AXEL will be the leading and first choice supplier of customised solutions for the global lubricating grease market. This simply means we have to strive to be the best; a world-class manufacturer who can make a huge difference for our customers, by being a reliable partner and helping them achieve their growth goals.
Becoming a greasy plant is fairly easy if you work with greases the whole day, every day. To be a grease plant: well organised, clean, safe, efficient, and inspiring, you have to work smart, be a learning company, and continuously improve every day.
Across our 6 grease manufacturing plants in Europe and North America, we have the unique opportunity to share best practices and learn from each other. Under our ONE AXEL philosophy, we work to make each plant and the AXEL Group stronger by transferring our best solutions, ideas, and practices, and by avoiding the same mistakes.
As our 3 US facilities grow rapidly to meet our customers’ demands, we continue investing heavily and in parallel, we are leveraging our European counterparts’ best practices. Our European colleagues are supporting the US in Operational Excellence, Visual Factory, Supply Chain, Inventory Management, and more. Our AXEL’s “Operations Academy” includes numerous physical (with a lot of rolled-up sleeves and aerobic cleaning exercises :) as well as remote workshops, dashboards, and follow-ups. A lot of synergistic effects are explored among the various teams, and improvements are being made daily.
Sharing is caring and that’s our slogan and roadmap to being a World Class Grease Manufacturer! ONE AXEL, because together is better.
Eric van der Horst,
General Manager of AXEL Christiernsson BV, the Netherlands.