Case Study: Kraft Foods
Company: Kraft Foods
Situation: The Kraft Foods Cheese Plant in Corning, NY was experiencing high demand and needed to increase throughput while maintaining traditionally high quality standards.
Role: Lead Consultant
Analysis: Each of the three product lines was analyzed for process flow, staffing, maintenance practices, and bottlenecks.
Findings: The analysis of each line yielded different throughput improvement opportunities. The Mozzarella and Ricotta lines had ongoing maintenance scheduling conflicts and planned outage overruns, as well as process control quality issues. The String Cheese line had bottlenecks on the packaging line, which impacted the upstream cheese production process and caused uneven production vs. schedule. The solution that had been tried was to pull additional staff from other departments. This led to more bottlenecks and quality problems due to varying training and experience levels of the supplemental staff available.
Solution and Result: A collaborative maintenance scheduling process was developed and installed with input from all production lines. Outage planning and scheduling software was brought in to improve the outage planning and execution tracking. In the String Cheese line, a line-balancing process was developed and installed using “Takt” time (based on market demand) so that the packaging area staffing could be adjusted in advance of increases or decreases in demand. Overall plant production increased by over 20% with fewer quality issues and unplanned outages.
