Situation

  • The client was a specialty packaging and plastics manufacturer owned by a mid-market private equity firm
  • One of the company’s manufacturing plants was underperforming in terms of its operational and profitability goals
  • The manufacturing plant suffered from a combination of complex, short-run orders and products and an inefficient layout driven by its legacy approaches
  • Members of SLKone were asked to perform an assessment and develop a plan to improve performance and profitability within the manufacturing operations

Bespoke Solutions

  • SLKone performed a deep-dive analysis of the organization including customer profitability, production run performance, defect analysis, and product flow
  • Customer profitability and production order analysis yielded a long tail of low-profitability, high complexity customers requiring rationalization
  • Product production flow and defect analysis illustrated poor plant layout and equipment issues created large profitability and production inefficiencies

Leading With Results

  • Improved product on-time-delivery: The reconfiguration of the plant layout allow for decreased production times and improved quality resulting in improved on-time-delivery metrics
  • Profitability Improved by over 20%: Identifying low-profit, high complexity customers and orders, and placing fees for setup and minimal run quantities resulted in over 20% of profitability improvement for these customers
  • Additional product capacity: The improvement in product flow and complexity reduction freed up additional capacity to take on part transfers from other facilities with capacity constraints leading to overall company profitability improvements