0
%
Improvement in Throughput
~
0
%
Improvement of OEE on Selected Forming Lines
Challenge
After being acquired in 2014, the company began to struggle financially in the following 5-6 years. With the advent of Covid in 2020, labor shortages/high employee turnover, supply chain related issues, and a lack of strong leadership in their Texas facility resulted in production shortfalls, limited profitability, negative material variance and moral issues throughout the plant.
Solution
Synergetics was tasked with providing guidance on managing the relatively large workforce (~900 people across 2 shifts x 7 days), and ultimately managing the plant on an interim basis until the right candidate could be sourced and onboarded. The keys to improvement of throughput and OEE included:
- Provided workforce management tools to determine daily staffing levels and assign staff for each shift and appropriate department, including kitchen, forming, and/or packaging work-center
- Created “leader standard work” activity checklists for each Manager, Supervisor, and Lead to assure their compliance to required functional responsibilities throughout each work-shift
- Developed playbooks and training materials for each of the 9 forming lines to assure lines were set up and run consistently across all shifts
- Improved quality and consistency of forming process to assure candy was within ever-tightening specifications and tolerances of $20M capex spent on packaging equipment installed during the engagement
- Ran the plant effectively for 3 months while new plant manager was recruited, interviewed, and onboarded; vast majority of all KPI’s showed improvement throughout engagement (eg: safety, quality, productivity, OTD, OT%, employee turnover)
