During a recent ceremony at the IBM High-End Server Plant in Poughkeepsie, NY, ASSEMBLY magazine presented the company with its 2008Assembly Plant of the Yearaward. Company officials received an engraved crystal award and a commemorative banner. More than 500 people attended the event.

“IBM is honored to receive this award,” said Jim King, plant manager. “IBM Poughkeepsie has a strong heritage and tradition, and adapts to new requirements while achieving high performance standards. Most importantly, our employees take pride in their workmanship, producing systems that represent the flagship of IBM Corp.”

The Poughkeepsie facility was selected as the 2008Assembly Plant of the Yearbecause of the way it has combined lean and green manufacturing initiatives to stay innovative in today’s global economy. The factory assembles some of the world’s most powerful and most complex servers, mainframes and supercomputers that are used by large organizations to maintain and process vast amounts of data. An article in the November issue ofASSEMBLYprofiles the people, products and production processes that make the plant successful.

The award ceremony in Poughkeepsie was attended by all employees, in addition to local press, politicians and senior executives from IBM’s corporate headquarters in Armonk, NY. Tom Esposito, publisher of ASSEMBLY, and Austin Weber, senior editor, were also on hand.

TheAssembly Plant of the Yearaward was created by ASSEMBLY in 2004 to showcase world-class production facilities in the United States. All manufacturers that assemble products in the U.S. are invited to nominate their plants. The goal of the award is to identify a state-of-the-art facility that has applied world-class processes to reduce production cost, increase productivity, shorten time to market and improve product quality.

For more information on the award and this year’s winner visitwww.assemblymag.com. Previous recipients of theAssembly Plant of the Yearaward were Schneider Electric/Square D (Lexington, KY); Lear Corp. (Montgomery, AL); Xerox Corp. (Webster, NY); and Kenworth Truck Co. (Renton, WA). Nomination forms for the 2009 award will be available on ASSEMBLY’s Web site early next year.