Micron Manufacturing Company

09/03/2026

From a 35-employee CNC shop to a Fortune 500 giant. Micron recently hosted a tour with a continuous improvement team from Archer Daniels Midland Company, focusing on lean systems.

From a Fortune 500 giant to a 35-employee CNC shop, the size difference is hard to overstate. Last month, seven continuous improvement professionals from Archer Daniels Midland toured Micron’s shop floor to find the parallels between the lean discipline ADM manages across a global footprint and Mi...

08/05/2026

Our maintenance and material receiving departments have been busy lately — welding, sawing, painting and assembling. They recently reimagined the design of our bar chamfering station to make several ergonomic and workflow improvements.

Our previous design relied on an operator hand-turning bars as the sanders on each end ground a chamfer onto the bar end. The new version uses rollers to both hold the bars in place and allow the sanding belts to roll the bars as they grind. This alone is a considerable ergonomic improvement, eliminating wrist strain from the process. The rack also takes movement of the bars into account for a compact workflow. Unchamfered bars rest just behind the work area, the work-in-progress bar sits on the rollers, and a shelf just below the work area stores chamfered bars ready to go to the machines.

Additionally, we moved the material rack that once sat behind the chamfering station to a spot against the wall, increasing our raw material storage capacity. The grey paint treatment these racks received will soon be the color scheme for all of our material racks, greatly improving their contrast against the white wall behind them.

07/23/2026

Swiss-style CNC lathes offer unique performance trade-offs compared to conventional CNC lathes. Their design incorporates a guide bushing, which stabilizes the bar stock directly at the cutting edge of the tools. This stability enables greater concentricity and repeatability, making Swiss especially effective for high-volume production runs.

07/22/2026

Part 3 of our lean visual systems series takes you onto our shop floor — the boards we use and the design choices keeping them from becoming wallpaper.

In Part 1 of this series, we made the case that every visual system trends toward wallpaper, and covered methods to design against the mechanisms of habituation. In Part 2, we laid out a framework for regular review to catch visual systems that are going stale. In this post we highlight four visual....

07/15/2026

All visual management systems need an update now and then. But our familiarity with our own system often gets in the way. How do you see it with fresh eyes?

Our latest blog on lean visual management — part two of three — offers a framework for keeping visual systems fresh.

Read it here:

A well-designed visual system still needs regular review. Here's the framework we use to catch lean visual systems before they go stale.

07/13/2026

If you follow our feeds, you probably know Micron provides CNC turning and milling. This capabilities sheet gets into the details — ideal spec ranges, equipment capacity, and the numbers that matter. Take a look.

07/09/2026

Wallpaper is something we choose, or perhaps someone else does. Regardless of our feelings towards it, we often stop noticing it over time. In a lean production environment, one of the most frustrating challenges is when our carefully designed visual cues fade into the background, becoming "lean wallpaper."

Our latest blog on lean visual management — part one of three — explores the reasons we stop noticing our visual systems and offers strategies for creating visual cues that remain prominent and effective.

Read the full post here:

This is the first post in a three-part series on lean visual systems — how they lose effectiveness over time, how to keep them sharp, and how we approach visual management on our own shop floor. Visual management is one of the core principles of lean manufacturing for good reason. Strong visual sy...

07/02/2026

Wishing all a happy Independence Day!

We are proud to wave the flag and humbled to play our part in America’s industrial strength. As we celebrate this milestone of 250 years, we salute the patriots — past, present, and future — who keep this country moving forward.

07/01/2026

"High accuracy, long-term partnerships, and principled attention to process" — Micron's Ian Ross describes the benefit of US manufacturing. One of the great rewards of our 70+ years in the precision machining industry is a way of doing business we're proud of.

06/11/2026

Is leadership continuity part of your supplier review? Our latest blog post details why succession planning is particularly important for CNC suppliers, and what steps to take if you don't know your key CNC supplier's status.

In the supplier review process, it’s natural to focus on details that are easy to measure: On-time delivery, non-conformance rate, capacity, customer service. These are good things to track, but there’s one less quantifiable measure worth paying attention to: leadership continuity. Why This Matt...