Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. Return Stronger is AME's first major fundraising effort. As a nonprofit, AME has always thrived through membership dues and event registrations, but our economy needs AME to act more broadly to help North American industry bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic's disruptive impact. Our mission is to inspire a commitment to enterprise excellence through experiential learning by bringing people together to share, learn and grow. With your support of the Return Stronger campaign, we will create new content and programming that serves manufacturing, health care, government and other sectors, support the next generation of lean leaders and increase our advocacy for vital reshoring, LeanShoring™ and nearshoring initiatives.
Why your support is crucial
Raising money helps AME affect positive change for North American industry.
The North American economy is facing unprecedented challenges brought on by the global pandemic. Organizations are failing. Supply chains are disintegrating. People are losing their jobs. Communities are in danger. Industries and organizations that work quickly to implement lean methods, empower employees and adopt a continuous improvement mindset will have the best chance to survive and even thrive during and after the pandemic.
The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) is singularly qualified to help organizations return stronger.
As a nonprofit, AME’s mission is to help manufacturing, health care, government and other sectors find and implement best practices for enterprise excellence. Organizations are grappling with employee engagement, supply chain disruptions, retraining employees, implementing new safety procedures and other complex, pandemic-related issues.
Join the Return Stronger movement — AME's first major fundraising effort — and help us provide resources to help industry reset and rebound during this unprecedented time.
AME is uniquely suited to help industry return stronger after the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic. Since 1985, AME’s comprehensive approach has helped organizations identify and implement best practices. We do this through benchmarking and assessments, practitioner-to-practitioner idea sharing at events, conferences and virtual learning experiences, skills trainings and thought leadership publications.
AME is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and your gift is tax deductible to the extent of the law.
To bounce back, industry and the economy need what AME offers,
and this need is immediate.
Failure to act now will have a lasting negative consequence for industry and communities for years to come. There is so much at stake. Armed with AME’s knowledge bank, lean tools and methods, businesses can assess and identify deficient operational practices and the solutions best suited for their organization to return stronger. We provide access and insights to operational excellence practitioners from the C-suite to the frontlines and create opportunities for organizations to benchmark and improve.
AME’s work is essential to essential businesses. A well-funded AME provides trainings and guidance that are crucial to overcoming the unprecedented challenges facing every sector of North American industry: manufacturing, health care, finance, technology, services, government and more.
Among AME’s members are pharmaceutical companies, health care and medical supply manufacturers, hospitals and others on the COVID-19 frontlines. We help these organizations with process improvements, best practice implementations and operational excellence assessments that show them how to better their methods to serve their customers and end users — often doctors and patients.
We serve primarily small- and medium-sized organizations that have nimble internal continuous improvement teams that do not have the means to fully fund all their necessary work. These businesses rely on AME for training and benchmarking, lean assessors and assessment tools, and access to thought leaders and best practices. What’s more, they are the backbone of local economies. They provide jobs, products and services that help communities and people prosper. When these businesses thrive, communities thrive. And when the communities thrive, our economy thrives. Without AME, these organizations, our economy and our communities will suffer.
To help avoid this fate, AME has rapidly shifted to provide virtual learning opportunities, idea exchanges and more thought leadership content.
We have re-imagined our 36th annual AME International Conference — the world’s largest lean conference — to lower the barrier to entry. We are shifting to a virtual conference format and lowering the registration cost so more people may participate. We are doing this to open our important programming and content to more practitioners who have an immediate and substantial need for the information shared by our speakers, tour sites and workshop trainers. Lowering the conference price allows organizations to register more people for the event, while virtual programming lets more people participate without travel expenses, safety concerns or geographic limitations. Likewise, virtual offerings also allow more speakers and tour sites to emerge — letting more presenters and companies share their lean operations and insights at a time when best-practice sharing is of the utmost importance.
Beyond the conference, we have shifted our regional events to offer them virtually and on a larger scale. We have piloted lean tours, weekly idea sharing “coffee breaks” and best-practice webinars and discussions. The unprecedented steps AME has taken are necessary to help the industries we serve, but they are also costly to produce.
Our priorities
We need your help to provide AME’s offerings to more people — now and in the future — so that our industry and our economy can return stronger.
Your support of Return Stronger will allow us to address these priority areas:
- Increase virtual offerings
- Advocate for reshoring, LeanShoring™ and nearshoring initiatives
- Support for the next generation of lean leaders
- Continue our original thought leadership content
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