Customer asked Elliott Davis: “Would you help us define and accelerate the operational transformation within our U.S. operations?”
Context
Leading plastics manufacturer had exposure to multiple end-markets. The customer had recently been acquired by a large private equity group that was looking to boost performance.
Customer had been struggling with poor on-time in-full (OTIF) delivery to customers and low overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), which created a significant backlog, despite 24/7 shop-floor operations. Further, the business’s cost structure was burdened with poor labor productivity ratios and high material-usage variances.
Our Approach
Elliott Davis broke the project into five work streams, leveraging DMAIC principles:
(1) Data clarity and metric optimization
- Processes for collection and cleansing of data that generated meaningful metrics to inform new metrics for management use
(2) Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
- Root-cause analysis of primary contributors to poor molding equipment, process performance
- Improved equipment performance enabled workforce rightsizing
(3) Maximizing customer satisfaction
- Identified drivers of OTIF issues, addressed root cause, and built ongoing monitoring tools
- Improved OTIF (and customer satisfaction) generated demand increases from customers
(4) Material variance
- Mapped material flow and addressed each waste-producing process
(5) Lean and 5S implementation
- Implemented visual management strategies to provide transparency to shop-floor performance
Customer Results
- Increased EBITDA by ~4x
- Order backlog reduced by 75%
- On-time-delivery increased from 45% to 93%
- $480K annualized savings from scrap reduction
- Plant-wide OEE increased by 41%
- Reduced inventory by ~30%
We Can Help
For more information on this and other topics, contact a member of our team.
The information provided in this communication is of a general nature and should not be considered professional advice. You should not act upon the information provided without obtaining specific professional advice. The information above is subject to change.