“The new HPP tubes/baskets are working out great for us. The additional capacity that your tubes offer saved us 339 cycles last month which translated into a payback period of under 5 weeks! The next phase is to implement your pallet building solution onto the front of our production lines.”
Ryan Bagos
Sr. Manager Continuous Improvement
Garden Fresh, a Division of Campbell Fresh
The Problem….
The customer had 2 Avure High-Pressure Processing Machines that were at capacity, and they lacked the space to store Work In Progress (WIP) prior to HPP. The current process used 2 basket stainless steel carts for direct loading of the HPP baskets off production which quickly gobbled up a bunch of limited floor space. As a result, much of the WIP had to be stored in Reusable Plastic Containers (RPC) that could be stacked to take advantage of vertical space. The use of the RPC caused the double handling of the product. Lastly, overflow WIP that could be HPP’d on site was being sent to an HPP tolling operation several hours away.
The Challenge…..
HPP Advisors was asked to assess the current situation and present a solution to increase the capacity of the 2 Avure HPP machines, eliminate the double handling attributed to using the RPC’s and reduce the amount of WIP being sent to a 3rd Party Tolling facility.
The HPP Advisors Solution……
HPP Advisors conducted fill ratio studies of the existing HPP baskets/tubes for all the customer SKU’s. As a result of the studies, HPP Advisors concluded that the design of the current basket on some of the SKU’s created additional wasted air space in the tubes that resulted in less than optimal fill ratio’s. HPP Advisors designed baskets with tighter tolerances that provided extra interior volume resulting in higher fill ratio’s.
Next, HPP Advisors looked to take advantage of Vertical space being used by the RPC’s and at the same time eliminate the labor costs and product damage from double handling of the product. The solution was to build pallets of preloaded baskets directly off production. This solution would have an additional benefit of reducing the number of trips required to transport the loaded baskets from output to the HPP machines. HPP Advisor pallets could carry 6 tubes at a time vs. the 2 basket carts, thus eliminating 2/3 of the labor costs associated with transport.
Subsequently the amount of WIP that needed to be sent out a 3rd Partly Tolling facility was reduced as a direct result of the increased fill ratio’s that increased the pounds of product processed per cycle.
The Results…….
The additional capacity the tubes offered saved over 339 cycles in the first month, which translated into $21,580 of labor savings. If forecasted volume did not drop, there would have been an additional savings of $28,476 of HPP Tolling expense avoided. Payback for Campbell Fresh ended up being 4.6 weeks. If not for the forecasted volume drop in the first month, the payback period would have only been 13.9 days.