How we work

80/20 Front to Back Process ITW’s 80/20 business process has been integral to our success for nearly 30 years. Simply put, 80/20 focuses our businesses on the 20 percent of customers that generate 80 percent of revenues. We structure our businesses around serving these key customers, giving them the special attention, products and services that address their specific needs and pain points. 80/20 is about getting closer to our highest-value customers. It’s also about keeping ITW’s operations efficient, despite our size and global scale.
80/20 is not a new concept. But ITW is known as the best in the business at 80/20 implementation. It’s important to keep in mind that 80/20 is not a cookie-cutter process—and it’s never applied the same way twice.  From the United States to the Czech Republic to China, our businesses continuously find new ways to apply our 80/20 principles. Since our first experiments with 80/20 in the 1980s, ITW has experienced decades of profitability and increased shareholder value. We have yet to encounter an alternative operating process in industrial manufacturing that has the ability to produce results that come anywhere close.

Customer-Back Innovation The first batch of ITW’s products were novel machines for producing gears and washing machines as invented 100 years ago, to help customers to solve the problems that other companies could not do. We provide highly specialized products rather than mass production of goods to solve complex problems in manufacturing. Most of ITW’s innovations are simple and ingenious. The brand-new product categories through our innovation has made us won the prestigious awards, which enables ITW to have a presence in the history of industrial design. In fact, we have been among the top patentees in US.
Innovative solutions come form the corporate culture highlighting the profound customer knowledge and entrepreneurship. We give support and trust to engineers, chemists and technicians, and commend our inventors through ITW Patent Association. ITW Technology Center will provide the consultancy and resources with regard to advanced materials, mechanical design and manufacturing process for every subsidiary of us.
Our employees will tell you that new ideas are the most important. In ITW, you can take limited risks to challenge yourselves, make mistakes and even fail, because this is how innovation comes into being.

Decentralized, Entrepreneurial Culture ITW is well known for its diversified business portfolios and highly decentralized operation strategy. ITW businesses operate independently under ITW framework. In fact, we rarely support top-down management mode, but we believe each business unit can manage their own business and make quick response to local market opportunities. Under our business mode framework, the business units can minimize or even avoid the impacts caused by complex organization and bureaucracy. This decentralized entrepreneurial culture can make us think and act in a responsive, flexible and dedicated company environment. We have another advantage benefited from product portfolios in rapidly growing industries. We can withstand the impacts from economic fluctuations through our diversification. This decentralized entrepreneurial culture is one of the elements of ITW’s unique business mode.