CELLOTAPE

Leading manufacturer of high quality labels for the Consumer Packaged Goods Industry

Implemented Lean Manufacturing
for 1.2 Million in Cost Savings

Manex employed proven continuous improvement techniques to maximize available floor space, improve time to market and ensure sufficient capacity to support the company’s 5 year growth plan. Cellotape and Manex focused on labor and equipment loading, materials flow and changeover activities.

Client Business Need

Cellotape’s strategic acquisition of a competitor resulted in two divergent operations with an overlap in administrative functions. The company’s executive management team wanted to evaluate the consolidation of both locations into one site and implement operational improvement through the utilization of lean manufacturing. In addition, Cellotape wanted to improve its total operational effectiveness, reduce costs and improve the “time to market” for designing and delivering their innovative labels.

 Approach

Manex used a proven, tailored approach designed to maximize the available floor space in the main location, to improve time to market on all products and ensure the company had sufficient capacity to support the company’s 5 year growth plan. Cellotape and Manex focused on labor and equipment loading, materials flow and changeover activities. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) was also implemented to ensure minimum downtime of key equipment, critical to meeting their tight timelines.

Project activities included:

  • Reviewing  and developing a 5-year sales growth plan
  • Measuring and analyzing uptime on equipment to determine throughput
  • Developing a “machine uptime” improvement plan to meet capacity needs
  • Creating current state and future state maps and layouts to optimize shop floor operations
  • Implementing proven 5S and Lean Manufacturing principles to reduce costs, reduce defects and improve profitability of orders
  • Implementing Root Cause Corrective Action (RCCA) training and Kaizen events
  • Implementing “Train the Trainer” concept for Lean Manufacturing Principles.
  • Creating 4 Kaizen event teams to continue improvement initiatives into the future

 Results Delivered

As a result of these continuous improvement activities, Cellotape dramatically increased production levels, reduced annual operating costs, improved quality and improved time to market. With improved operations flow and trained production team members, Cellotape is positioned to exceed its operational requirements over the next 5 years.

Specific results include:

  • Over $600k reduction in operating costs
  • 35% improvement in machine uptime by reducing set up times
  • Consolidation of plant operations resulting in over $1.2 million in savings
  • 80% reduction in non value added walk time for inspectors
  • Reduction in order entry process to floor time by 35%
  • 34% reduction in lead times by relocating  all plate making equipment to Fremont
  • 45% reduction in cost of labels
  • Reduction of total energy costs by 35%
  • Elimination of handling damage from transfer of product between facilities
  • Improvement in company’s carbon footprint by eliminating duplicate disposal of hazardous waste costs

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