Breakthrough results from the operation you already have.

One of the world’s leading brewers bought two prototype fillers, each rated at 1000 bottles per minute. During commissioning, when run at design speed, around 30% of bottles were under-filled. To reduce the reject level to an even vaguely acceptable level the sped was reduced to 800 bottles a minute for regular beer and 500 a minute for the low alcohol brands. Even at that speed the rejected bottles cost $2 million a year. The extra labor due to the slow running cost a further $500,000 a year.

The designer of the filler spent 6 months on-site trying to make the fillers work correctly. He concluded the design was fundamentally flawed and that the filler maximum speed was, in fact, 800 bpm. The supplier then gave the two fillers to the brewer for free.

For the next 8 years the fillers ran at these slow speeds, generating $2 million a year of scrap bottles; this level of performance was budgeted for. The company became a client of HAGEN & Co and they then used CFA to examine the problem. Using CFA they developed the hierarchical tree of control factors to determine how the filling process actually works. This shifted attention to the behavior of the beer as it left the bottle and entered the centering bell. The filler was designed so that when the stainless steel fill tube exited the bottle after filling its volume was replaced with beer draining out of the centering bell. The centering bell was made of thick stainless steel, so it was impossible to observe what was actually happening inside.

CFA determined that the size of the annular passageway was causing the beer to accelerate to over 70 mph, causing a significant pressure drop, which brought CO2 out of the solution. This filled the centering bell with foam, not liquid beer. CFA further showed that as the filling tube was withdrawn from the bottle the subsequent increase in volume – caused by the tube’s volume not being replaced by liquid beer from the centering bell – created a pressure drop in the bottle itself. This pressure drop then allowed CO2 in the beer in the bottle to come out of solution, causing the vigorous ‘fobbing off’ – foaming of the beer – that was responsible for the low fills.

A reduction in the diameter of the fill tube from 13mm to 9mm – counterintuitive, because the problem was seen as needing more beer in the bottle, suggesting a larger fill tube – allowed a larger annular passageway. This meant a much slower velocity of beer and therefore a negligible pressure drop, leading to liquid beer in the centering bell. The same modification led to zero pressure drop in the bottle and complete replenishment of the volume of the fill tube after it had been withdrawn.

At $100 per 9mm fill tube, 104 heads per machine, 2 machines the solution cost $20,800 and took a couple of weeks. The savings was $2,500,00 a year, plus the cancellation of a third crusher costing $800,000, ordered because the crushers – used to crush the rejected low-filled bottles – were the bottleneck on the line.

One of Europe’s leading sugar manufacturers had worked with Hagen & Co to use CFA to achieve a 19% increase in throughput of their flagship refinery in just 4 weeks. CFA is a structured process for solving “unsolvable” technical and business problems. This resulted in a $5.3 million rise in profitability.

To their great surprise, the people who operated, maintained and managed the factory discovered that, using CFA, they could challenge their beliefs about what was really possible, and deliver results that exceeded everyone’s expectations. Productivity and profitability increased dramatically, year on year.

It was time to deliver results of this scale across the business. Either one or two people from each of the six factories attended a CFA introduction at one of the smaller factories.

On the first hands-on day of the program, when the participants introduced themselves in the factory control room, they explained that they were going to help increase the throughput of the factory. The response was laughter:

“You’re welcome to try, but good luck to you!”

“You can’t run any faster – the evaporators are scaled up, and the cooling tower is knackered!”

“Come back and let us know how you get on!”

Four weeks later, the throughput of the factory had been increased by 10%, with no capital expenditure. This resulted in a $950,000 increase in profitability.

The Factory Manager spoke about what he saw to be different about CFA: “There are two major differences. Firstly, we knew many of the issues that CFA was able to tackle couldn’t be solved without significant capital, therefore no one was working on them. Secondly, of those problems that we were working on, the enormous number of variables in each case meant we spent lots of time and effort exploring fruitless avenues. CFA eliminates these irrelevant variables. You are focused on the few things that actually matter.”

At each of the factories, an assessment was carried out to calculate the size of the opportunity for improvement using CFA. The total opportunity to increase profitability across all six factories was calculated to be $43 million a year.

Meanwhile, improvement work continued at the factory where CFA had been first used. Sugar output increased by a further 25%, and the factory was operating continuously at a throughput greatly exceeding the record performance, which had previously only been achieved for a few hours.

Now that everyone in the company could see the sheer size of the opportunity, and it had been proven that a large proportion of it could be realized in a very short space of time, the importance of leading this initiative from the top down, in all of the factories, was clear to everyone concerned.

CFA was implemented across all six factories. Within four months, historical production records were being consistently broken at every factory.

The predicted savings from the first twelve months of implementation are $12 million plus.

“The results have been quite phenomenal!” Factory Manager

“We got a phone call from the CEO, congratulating us, and asking how we achieved this!” Factory Manager

“I was looking for a roadmap to success. Now I have one, and you’ve given me the compass too!” Operations Manager

Hagen & Co is a consultancy company who specialize in using CFA to deliver a dramatic increase in performance and profitability for the world’s leading manufacturing and processing companies.

CFA allows your people to challenge their current beliefs and constraints, and develop a new set of beliefs about the capability of their assets.

This always results in a level of performance and profitability, which was previously believed to be unachievable.

If you would like to find out more information, contact us at info@hagenco.com or visit www.hagenco.com.

One of the world’s top five cosmetic companies acquired another business and transferred seven nail lacquer bottling lines into one of their existing plants. When the lines were transferred every effort was made to make the lines fit better with the latest lean thinking: accumulation was removed, production boards were put on every line, and the line layouts were redesigned to fit a smaller footprint and a ‘U’ configuration to use fewer operators. Unfortunately, the lines’ performances were unstable and target OEEs were not being met. Soon, the rated line speeds were decreased and increases in OEE were seen! A 5% increase in output per hour across the board was achieved by allocating a 6 Sigma black belt to each of the lines.

Even after the lines were de-rated, OEE targets were not being met. In a last ditch effort to reach target numbers before the end of the fiscal year, the company put together a Constrain Breaking Team consisting of a process engineer, a mechanic and two line operators and hired Hagen & Co to train and lead that team. The initial scope of work was to increase the performance of line 5, since it had the lowest OEE, but analysis using Hagen’s patented True Opportunity^® method identified a much larger dollar opportunity on line 4, which was behind on service requirements to such a degree that a third of the sales volume for the line was being co-packed. After dealing with some initial pushback from a heavily OEE driven organization, the team ignored the “squeaky wheel” and focused on the highest dollar opportunity.

The Constraint Breaking Team went out to the line to analyze its performance using Hagen’s Line Control Philosophy, going beyond the current speed ratings and OEE and instead looking at the True Potential of the line. Data was collected and analyzed to prioritize all sources of lost opportunity on the line including downtime, waste, and lost time due to running the bottleneck slower than its maximum speed. The team then used Hagen’s problem solving methodology, Control Factor Analysis^® (CFA^®), to solve the largest problems impacting the line’s performance.

The single largest source of lost time was found to be running the bottleneck slower than its maximum speed and, in contrast to the corporate strategy of working on downtime until the uptime reaches 70% and only then increasing speed, the team set out to recapture the lost time using a controlled Speed Trial. The Speed Trial quickly identified the speed-limiting problem: the cap feeder could not feed caps fast enough to keep up with the line. Using CFA, the behavior of the caps was understood more deeply than before and the geometry of the caps was found to be causing caps to wedge as they went through a 30 degree bend in the cap feed tunnel. The tunnel was redesigned, increasing the radius of the tunnel’s bend to eliminate cap wedging. This allowed a speed increase of 32% while eliminating the need for 5 air lines and a pneumatic cylinder previously installed as fixes for this problem. The team continued to resolve the other problems identified during their analysis of the line and the daily issues that popped up during the project, all through the CFA problem solving methodology.

When asked by the Vice President of Manufacturing what was different about the CFA approach versus approaches they had previously used, an operator on the team replied:

“CFA is a new way of thinking. A method that allows a team to identify, isolate, understand, dig deep, and permanently fix a problem. No brainstorming or assuming, and no band-aiding. CFA gets to the raw mechanics of how the machine is supposed to work and allows you to break it down, exceeding what you have done in the past. The team, before CFA, was using the ‘5 Why’ and ‘Fishbone’ methods, we put together an action plan and although there were good ideas, they were too broad as a result of brainstorming. They did not help us dig deep and get to the root cause in a scientific way like we did with CFA.

Most importantly, the team believes and can prove CFA works.”

Using their new understanding of Line Control Philosophy, the team now understood the impact changeovers were having on production in a new light. While company standards measured the lost time due to changeovers as the downtime at the end of the line, the palletizer, the real lost time was the lost time at the bottleneck of the line, the filler. This allowed the true changeover duration to be disguised by accumulation rework bottles after the filler and capper during normal operation and manually feeding them back onto the line at a very low rate during the changeover. Measuring lost time at the bottleneck placed a new urgency on cutting down true changeover durations. This was done by analyzing the current methods for changeover and prioritizing the actions involved so that critical path actions were given priority, allowing for a 55% reduction in changeover duration.

As a result of the project, line 4 production was increased by 42%, with productivity continuing to increase. Eight of the top 10 production days in the history of the line had occurred during the last 4 weeks of the project. This resulted in an annualized savings of over $440,000 in only 8 weeks, with no capital expenditure.

One of the world’s leading chemical companies has a large plant in the USA making an acid in monomer form; although this acid is sold as a monomer, it readily polymerizes in the distillation column after 20 days or so. The 6 stories high distillation column would be filled with a solid, jelly-like polymer. Production stopped for 5 days whilst operators cut the polymer out with high-pressure water jets and sent it off to the landfill. There are 8 other plants around the world, each with the same problem. The cost of lost production was $80 million a year.

The problem has existed since the first plant was built, 12 years ago. Dozens of chemists and chemical engineers have looked at the problem. In fact, more than one PhD had been awarded based on research into the issue. The $80 million a year was simply an unavoidable cost of doing business. Work on the problem ceased in the existing plants and focus changed to designing a process where distilling acid from a solvent was not necessary, thereby eliminating the column from the design. This would mean scrapping the 8 existing plants.

The company used this problem as a pilot for CFA. CFA is a structured method for solving “unsolvable” technical and business problems. CFA is used to build a hierarchical tree that explains exactly how the process in question works. The tree focuses exclusively on those parts of the process that are out of control, greatly reducing the number of variables that need to be investigated.

Once these critical factors had been identified there was significant interest in understanding them. The operators and engineers designed and installed a sample-taking apparatus to take samples at the newly identified points in the process. When the samples were captured it was clear that the reflux system was to blame. A redesign of how reflux was introduced back into the top of the column, costing $50,000, was fitted at the next shutdown. Once installed, polymerization was almost completely eradicated. Output increased by 20%.

The new reflux design was fitted to the other plants and close to $80 million a year fell to the bottom line.

One of the chemical engineering involved noted that “There were simply so many other possibilities to explore that, without CFA, finding the cause was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. The great power of CFA lies in its ability to cut away the inessential and focus you on the critical.”

If you have unresolved, technical, or business issues please try CFA. Contact us at info@hagenco.com or visit www.hagenco.com.

A division of a leading multi-national textile company was acutely aware that they were unable to satisfy the market demand for their products across Europe and South America.

“This month, our existing customers requested 15% more volume than we were able to supply them. Worse still, new customers that would have represented a 10% increase in sales had to be turned away because we were unable to meet the extra demand”

General Manager, South America

However, to capture extra market share, they were going to have to move quickly. Their competitors were laying down extra capacity, and there was not the time or capital available to build a new plant, or extend the existing facilities.

They had heard about the dramatic reductions in cost, which had been achieved throughout the company’s USA plants, by using CFA to deliver rapid improvements in performance, and were keen to see if it could help them with their capacity constraint. CFA is a structured approach for solving “unsolvable” technical and business problems. Noted the Chief Engineer: “We want to do the best possible job. If there is a better way we’d be stupid not to use it.”

The goal at the outset was a 10% increase in throughput of the entire facility in 3 months, which at the time no one in the company dared to believe was possible.

A cross-section of the employees, from material handler to general manager, attended a training course in the core elements of CFA. They identified a list of desirable improvements that they believed could only be achieved by spending capital.

One of the key issues, which was constraining the capacity of the business, was the fact that many of their extrusion lines were unable to run at their full design speeds. At higher speeds, water from the cooling baths was being carried into the ovens, causing the extruded tapes to break or be of lower strength than was required.

They had been aware of the problem for years, but despite devoting large amounts of time and money to it (the extrusion lines had been retro-fitted with shakers, blowers and vacuums) they hadn’t been able to make any significant headway. Because so much effort had been made in the past to remove the water, with little effect, there was initially very little interest in using CFA to re-examine the problem. However, once CFA had been used to build a parameter tree that revealed just the few critical variables interest increased considerably.

Focusing exclusively on these critical parameters, they discovered very quickly exactly how to make the water removal systems perform optimally. A number of simple actions permanently eliminated the problem, without capital expenditure.

At the end of 2 months the throughput of the entire facility had increased by 14.5%, and there had been no need for capital expenditure. Over the following 4 weeks, the remaining identified actions were completed, and the increase in throughput stabilized at 17%. This additional capacity was worth US$2 million to them in extra annual profit.

The European facilities were also unable to satisfy the market demand. Following the success in South America, they were keen to see if they could achieve similar results.

Again, a cross section from the entire business attended a CFA session. One of the issues that needed to be solved was in the carding operation, which prepared the yarn for spinning. The operators were constantly slowing the carding machines down, as the yarn became too thick or too thin at higher speeds. Using CFA, the operators were able, for the first time, to produce yarn of perfect specifications at any machine speed.

At the end of 5 weeks, throughput had increased by 10%. This was worth US$1.4 million a year in extra profit.

“Are you ready to transform yourself and your organization? I would recommend this process to anyone - except my competitors!”

Manufacturing Manager

CFA is a structured method for solving „unsolvable‟ business and technical problems. It can allow you to achieve performance levels currently believed to be impossible.

If you would like to achieve more from your business, please try CFA. Contact us at info@hagenco.com, or visit www.hagenco.com.

For two weeks, a Constraint Breaking Team (CBT) worked on a line using Hagen & Co’s methodology within a leading American consumer-product company. Working specifically with one of 14 lines, the CBT consisted of operators, mechanics, the area manager, and two Hagen consultants. The aim was to utilize the Hagen team’s knowledge and understanding of problem solving and line optimization and the plant team’s knowledge and understanding of the line for the purpose of improving line efficiency.

After a few days of training, the team set out onto the shop floor to analyze the performance of the line using Hagen’s Line Control Philosophy and problem-solving tool Control Factor Analysis^® (CFA^®). Data was collected and analyzed through a Lost Time Study, which allowed the team to identify all the sources of lost opportunity on the line (including downtime, waste, and lost time due to running the bottleneck slower than its max speed). The team also analyzed accumulation behaviors and capabilities, as well as the logic behind controlling the sub-process speeds.

A result of an oven crash: a pile of melted plastic preforms that briefly caught on fire and stopped production.

With a better understanding of how the team’s line was currently running, an action plan was developed to drive the changes needed for a more efficient line. Interestingly this action plan was completely different to what the plant team had been working on previously. From the Lost Time Study, the most significant source of lost time at the output bottleneck was a crash in the oven. The output bottleneck, the blow-molding machine, inflates plastic bottles from a heated plastic vial or preform. Preforms travel through an oven to be heated, but during an oven crash, the preform would melt onto one of the light bulbs in the oven and cause subsequent preforms to melt as well. With a build-up of melted preforms, the light bulbs begin to break and lead to a small fire. This problem had existed for years, however previous problem solving efforts had always failed.

The plastic preform was jammed into the guide rail due to the metal plunger being incorrectly positioned: the angle and penetration depth were out-of-control.

Using Hagen’s CFA^® technique, the root causes of the oven crash were identified and the team developed and executed actions to permanently eliminate them. As a result of the changes, no more oven crashes occurred and in addition, the bottle blowing machine began to blow more consistent bottles. With more consistent bottles, there were fewer jams downstream at the accumulation station and subsequent sub-processes. Labeling performance also significantly improved.

Besides solving downtime issues, the team also optimized accumulation and sped up several sub-processes. Accumulation capacity ahead of the output bottleneck was increased from 84% to 97%. The speed bottleneck saw a 6.6% increase in speed, while the speed of the labeler and filler increased by 25% and 19% respectively. Additionally, the team improved the logic between the accumulation and nearby sub-processes to reduce idle time and increase the time available for the speed bottleneck to run.

After only 7 days, the line hit a new shift record of 70% OEE, up from the previous record of 64% and an average for the previous 3 months of 41.3%.

In response to the team presentation, a senior executive had the following comments:

"I am energized by what I see here today. You are great presenters, there was a lot of very detailed information, but I could still follow and understand it. You went beyond my expectations"

Vice President of Home Care, North America

In two short weeks, a team of experienced plant personnel learned new concepts and techniques and then worked together to transform the performance of their line by solving problems that were seen as constraints since they were “unsolvable”. That’s why we call it a Constraint Breaking Team!