Inside a global aseptic packaging company, one site in Brazil had a distinction nobody wanted: worst cost of quality across the entire 40 plant network.
Quality losses were at 9.1%, the result of a bunch of issues. Material was wasted through the process, finished goods were rejected to often, product was returned by customers. It resulted in BRL 20.9M a year in cost due to poor quality.
The plant had a leadership turnover because of the low performance. But that meant each new leader was having to start from a bad spot, without limited institutional knowledge. And the company gave them a hard target: bring quality losses from 9.1% down to 6.4% in 5 months.
We started by mapping roughly 120 process variables across the plant's 8 process steps, then narrowed it down. We found two steps caused the most issues: scraping, with 25 variables, and final folding, with 37. Most of our energy went there.
Eight cross-functional improvement teams took on the losses using PDCA, with 76 employees trained on the job as the work happened. One 5-Why investigation traced a recurring defect to equipment vibration shifting an air nozzle in the card infeed (the kind of thing that would be impossible to find in a conference room.) The team also fixed 30 parameters to prevent settings from drifting between shifts, and created standardized 8 equipment setups with SOPs for each line.
Last, we implemented a four-tier meeting cadence (stand-up, area, plant manager, director) and created a process to review 20+ leading indicators so the plant could spot deviations in real time.
Five months in, quality losses had dropped to 5.2%, well past the 6.4% goal. Five of the eight improvement teams hit their targets. And the plant climbed from worst in the network to second best among 40+ plants.
The part we're most proud of is that last row. Two years after the engagement the losses were still falling.
We effectively did a Pareto optimization, focusing on the 2 steps that could make the biggest dent.
We trained the team to adopt a new problem-solving culture based on disciplines like the "five why's" and root cause analysis.
And the standardization work helped embed both the solutions we found and a process for finding the next ones into the way the company operated.