black belt mini project

Sean Gorman Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo Ca- Ophelia Business of Collage- Industrial Technologies

Revistioin: October 15 2015

Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Mini-Project Justification of New Tray Washing

Machine

Prepared by Sean Gorman

[email protected]


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EXECUTIVE SUMMERY Fresh Ventrue Foods is a produce processing plant located at 1205 Craig Drive in Santa

Maria CA. Fresh Venture food is in cooperation with Babe Farm’s and Gold Coast Packaging for their supply of produce and shipment of product all over the United States and Canada. Fresh Venture Food provides a variety of produce to retailers across North America such as baby spinach and cauliflower heads.

Currently Fresh Ventrue Foods is seeing a growth in their company with more customers buying from them each day. Due to the high volume of customer more and more produce has been coming in and out of the processing plant each day. All produce that enters into the plant is by either large bins or trays that are shipped from the field. On average there is about 4,100 different types of produce trays that pass in and out of the Fresh Venture Foods processing plant. Each produce tray is reusable but must be cleaned and sanitized before the tray is ready to be brought back out to the field for harvest. The cleaning and sanitation process is done by a tray washing machine that requires a labor force of four workers to operate. This current tray washing machine is slow and uses a large amount of water per day, close to 3000 gal/day! With water shortages playing a huge role in the agriculture business Fresh Venture Foods decided it was time to relook at the current tray washing process and look into different options about finding a new tray washing machine and reworking the tray washing process.

Once observing, measuring, and analyzing the current state of the tray washing machine it was clear that there are many places where improvement can take place in the process. First step was to look into a new machine that would use recycled water to reduce the amount of water being used when washing trays. Second was to rework the process of how the treys are going to be washed once the new trey washing machine was purchased. Currently the process is at a labor force of 4 workers but can be cut down to 2 workers with a new Standerd Operations Procedure that will be implemented with the new trey washing machine. Lastly, an opportunity arrived when the team found out the amount of prep work that must happen before the tray can actually be washed. The team found that if a more effective trey washing machine was implemented with a more effective SOP for the labor force these trays will be washed with a higher quality of cleanliness and sanitation.

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Serveral reccommendations have been put forward for Fresh Venture Foods to consider once the new trey washing machine is in place. They are as follows :

1. Have all employees know how to do each job in the new SOP. This will include cleaning, organization, washing, and palletizing the produce trays. Along with full knowledge of how the new trey washing machine operates.

2. Construct the SOP so only a labor force of 2 workers are needed to run the process. 3. Spend the extra time to properly train the two employees. The two employees will have

to learn how to work effecivley and quickly. Thus a higher wage should be paid to them.

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DEFINETool #1: Project Charter: The project charter was selected as the very first tool to be used because it started to give insight about what the project was going to consist of. The tool also helps to give a basic idea of what has to happen in order for the project to be completed.

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Interpretation: Project draft charter help to layout the project mission statement and the overall project description. This also helped to break down the entire project into smaller pieces that can be analyzed further down the road. Lastly the project draft charter helps to identify any potential problems that could arise later down the road as the project gets more in-depth.

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Tool #2: Process Flow Chart: This tool was selected to get an overall view of the current tray washing process. The tool will help us to define what is actually going on in the current tray washing process and will help to define where the labor force during the shift. A question to keep in mind when using this tool is, ‘What little changes can be made to this process to make it flow easier than before’?

Interpretation: This tool was very helpful with identify who is doing what at a certain stage of the tray washing process. What can be seen here is that there are a total of seven steps that is needed to complete the entire process of tray washing that includes a labor force of 4 workers. This tool will become very helpful later in the project because it will be easy to look at this picture and brainstorm what steps can be combined or taken out. Also it will provide a good starting point to easily insert a new trey washing machine so a new SOP can be built around it.

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MEASURE

Tool #3: Data Collection Plan: This tool was chosen for one of the measurement tools because there are many different variables that are going into this project. This tool will help to layout how the data will be collected and where the data is going to be collected from. A question to keep in mind is ‘is the data sets being collected a reliable and accurate source’?

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Interpretation: This tool was good because it help me to look into the data that was about to be collected and how it applies to either the machine or the process of the trey washing. The tool allows for specification of who should be collecting the data and it gave a guidance on how the data should be collected. As a result it is now known that all data that will be collected will apply directly to the tray washing process. This ensured the team that no data will be collected that does not directly apply to the tray washing process.

Tool #4: CTQC Cause and Effect Matrix: This tool was selected because there became a need to know what cause and effect variables were the most important to the tray washing process. The preferred outcome of this tool will provide the three most influential causes in the process. A good point to keep in mind when using this tool is look at the most basic causes and see how they affect the current tray washing process.

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Interpretation: This tool is helped to identify and quantify three causes that are playing a huge role in the tray washing process. This tool found that worker training is the biggest factor in the tray washing process. Next to come is water consumption and the operation of both of the machines such as the forklift and the tray washer. Now that we know these factors will play a huge role in the tray washing process they will be carefully monitored when the new SOP is created for the new tray washing machine.

Analyze

Tool #5: 5 Why Analysis: This tool was chosen mainly on the fact that it needs to be determined what the root cause of why there is such a large need of workers to wash amount of daily trays. Even though we know the main factors that play a big role into the tray washing process it is still needed to breakdown the process even further to find the real root cause of this problem.

5 Whys

Problem: Current tray washing process requires a large labor force to wash all produce trays

Why?

- On average there is about 4,100 trays that need to be washed in one day

Why?

- That is the amount of produce trays being brought in every day thus about 4 workers need to be working on the process

Why?

- The process can only be complete in one shift if there are four workers on the job

Why?

- One worker preps the trays, one worker places trays into washer, one worker will palletize trays, and one worker covers the trays with a plastic bag.

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Why?

- This is the process that must be done with the current machine to meet the demand of clean treys

Root Cause: To clean 4,100 produce trays in one shift four workers must be on this process with the constraints of the current machine. If the machine was to be replaced with a machine that allows for one worker to prep and enter the trays into the machine, while another worker can palletize the trays cover the trays then the labor force can be reduced.

Interpretation: This is a tool that proves to be very beneficial time and time again. This tool helped to find that the root cause of the trey washing process is that the current machine requires to large of labor force to run properly. If there was a new machine in place this labor force could be cut in half due to how the new trey washing machine is operated and is set up. Overall the workers are performing small jobs that could be done by two workers with the proper amount of training.

Tool #6: 2 Means T-test: This tool was chosen at this point to help analyze the data that was collected from the old tray washing machine. The data set is the amount of water consumption that old tray washing machine uses. This will be compared to the water consumption of the new tray washing machine. Both of the data sets units are in gallons/day.

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Interpretation: Even though just by looking at the data it was easy to see that the new tray washing machine would use less water than the old tray washing machine this tool was useful to help explain just that. The confidence interval was chosen at 1% because the company needs to be sure that new machine in fact uses less water before they invest $37,000 on the machine. Overall it is now verified that the old tray washing machine does use considerable more water than the estimated water consumption of the new trey washing machine.

Improve

Tool #7: Standard Operations Procedure: At this stage of the project since it has been verified that it is reasonable to go with the new tray washing machine it is important that a new process is created to compliment this decision. The new machine will only need two workers to operate this process. It is important that they know exactly what needs to get done for the process to run smoothly and meet the required trays to be washed per day.

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Interpretation: This tool was a perfect tool to use to help create a good SOP for the new trey washing machine. It helped the team to breakdown the process into 9 different steps that will help the process run smoothly and effectively for tray washing. What was also useful about this tool is it gave the option to write down key notes for each step that will take place in the process. Hypothetically, if both the tray washer and tray palletizer are able to follow these steps in the tray washing process then they should be able to clean the required amount of trays for that day.

Tool #8: New Process Flow Chart: This tool was chosen because there is need to create a new process flow chart with a new machine being implemented. This process flow chart will depict where the two workers will be. In this process flow chart numbers are added to signal new value added points come into effect with the new layout for the new tray washing machine.

Interpretation: This tool was useful because it helped to map out what the new process will look like once the machine is installed. Each of the numbers in the drawing represent new value added points that will happen because of the process layout.

For number 1 the trays will not have to be depalletized then restacked. This was done with the old tray washing machine because workers would have to pick out any large debris of produce out of the treys that the old tray washing machine could not properly wash. However, with the new machine Is more powerful thus will be able to remove large debris with one pass and eliminate the annoyance of stacking and restacking treys.

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For number 2 the workers will not have to move a large amount of distance to get the trays. This is will eliminate the annoyance of the workers having to move back and forth to grab trays and place them into the machine.

For number 3 the tray palletizer will be closer where the trays are pushed out from the machine. This will allow for little movement of the tray palletizer. He will then be able to stack trays much faster than the old tray washing machine.

For number 4 the new tray washing machine will only use about 250 or 500 gallons of water per day as compared to the old trey washing machine that is using about 3000 gallons of water per day. This is close to 89% water savings for the company. This water savings is possible with the new machine because it uses a tank that recycles water to help clean the trays rather than using new water like the old tray washing machine.

Control

Tool #9: CHECK Process: The check process was chosen because it address 5 different aspects of keeping a new process in check. When using this tool it is important to keep in mind that both process managers and process workers should be able to understand when to reference this check process and should be easy to follow. Once this tool is created it can be used with each shift of when the tray washing machine is in use. The CHECK acronym stands for:

Correct

Verify that all workers are trained properly with the new tray washing machine implemented and knows the following:

- Can identify the correct produce tray- Know the amount of water and chemicals to use for the Machine- Can explain the basic process of cleaning the trays with the new machine- Tray Washer can perform the Tray Palletizers job and vise-versa

Housekeeping

Verify that the workstation is cleaned each day after the shift

- Any produce debris is cleaned and disposed of properly- “Dirty” water is disposed of properly - All equipment is clean and tools are returned to the right place- New Tray Washing Machine is perfectly clean and ready for the next day shift

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Equipment

Verify that all equipment is in working order before and after shift

- All equipment is ready to be used when needed: Plastic wrap, tie downs, pallets, pressure water nozzle

- Report any damage done to the machine to Alvaro Ceja. - Log any damage that is done to the machine

Contain

Verify that the process that is in place will produce as little defects as possible and ensure that no defects will be passed on to the next step

- Are the treys broken?- Are the treys cleaned and sanitized out of the Tray Washing Machine - Are there any pallets that are broken or have cracks in them

Keep Doing It!

Make the CHECK Process apart of the daily routine for every shift

- Continually verify that the Tray Washing machine is in perfect working order- Reward hard working individuals. New process will require much more effective work

than last try washing process- Workers should be asking themselves what can be done to make this process easier and

faster

Interpretation: This tool is important to use because it will help with all future runs of tray washing. The tool describes simple tasks that should be completed for the process to run smoothly time and time again. This CHECK process can also be edited as needed to help overcome any other obstacles that can arrive later down the road with the tray washing process.

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Tool #10: Project Close-Out: Lastly, the project close out helps to finish up the project and to show the customer what requests have been met from the work of this project. This tool also lets


the customer know that no additional work will be done on the project unless requested by the customer.

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Signature Block


X Sean Gorman Date: 10/12/2016

X Harold ReyesDate: 10/12/2016

Interpretation: This tool was helpful in the end of the project to state requirements that should be met when the project comes to a close. The tool also lets us set a target goal for when the new tray washing process starts. This allows us to come back to the project close out to compare the actual value of improvement on the process. With the new tray washing machine the company will begin to save money with the reduction of labor force and water will be saved once the machine is put into effect.

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black belt mini project

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