GainSeeker Case Studies

GainSeeker Suite Enables Dramatic Decrease in Cost of Goods Sold

Consolidated Container Company (CCC) is one of the largest suppliers of rigid plastic packaging in North America. Many of their facilities were using outdated legacy information systems, and the company had no formal standardized quality data system. According to Vicki Slavik, Corporate Quality Director, the company was “an internally focused company, and quality was a pain point for our customers.”

Matt Simpson, Corporate Quality Systems Manager, was tasked with recommending a single system to deploy across the company. The new system would provide plant-floor personnel with up-to-the-minute information about their asset’s performance. At the same time, the data would be rolled up across production lines and manufacturing facilities so that leadership at the local and corporate levels could easily see what was happening.

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Food Manufacturer Reduces Waste by Over 70% in Six Weeks

Dan Wadyka, Assistant Director of Quality Control at Giorgio Foods, was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, new company leadership was pushing for major growth and change. On the other, some managers and supervisors felt that the current way of working was good enough.

Wadyka saw an opportunity to support the growth initiatives of the leadership and galvanize support for these initiatives among middle management.

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Multi-plant Packaging Company Drives Revenue Improvement by Boosting Line Speeds 15-20% Over Name Plate Capacity

GainSeeker has had a profound impact on the business, enabling increased responsiveness and better customer service. That, in turn has impacted productivity. “We’re running 15-20% above name plate capacity from the equipment manufacturers,” the manager explained. “This is due to the fact that we can better understand our product and our processes. Without that better understanding there is no way we could have increased our line speeds.”

For this business, plant capacity acts as a governor on revenue, so an increase in line speed translates into increased plant capacity, and increased revenue.

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Multi-plant Packaging Company Drives Revenue Improvement – The Senior Quality Manager’s Perspective

GainSeeker has had a profound impact on the business, enabling increased responsiveness and better customer service. That, in turn has impacted productivity. “We’re running 15-20% above name plate capacity from the equipment manufacturers,” the manager explained. “This is due to the fact that we can better understand our product and our processes. Without that better understanding there is no way we could have increased our line speeds.”

For this business, plant capacity acts as a governor on revenue, so an increase in line speed translates into increased plant capacity, and increased revenue.

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Multi-Plant Packaging Company Drives Revenue Improvement – The CIO’s Perspective

Bringing six newly acquired plants under the corporate umbrella was going smoothly, but he saw at least one area, quality systems, that needed to change. And he knew it was not going to be a popular decision.

“They went kicking and screaming,” but the resistance was founded on lack of experience. Having never experienced GainSeeker Suite, the staff didn’t know what they were missing.

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Improving on time delivery and reducing inventory

We provide a system that captures data immediately across all aspects of the process so that visibility is improved and processes can be analyzed in more detail.

Using this approach, one industrial products client reported these results: 30% improvement in on-time delivery, >50% reduction in inventory, and Cycle time for improvement projects accelerated by over 10%.

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Technology Enabled High Performance Culture

Situation A Vice President of Operations for a US-based electronics manufacturer found his team struggling to identify opportunities to improve their business. Turf wars were common, as were racks of components waiting for rework and retesting. Critical issue Bright,...

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Integration increases scrap visibility, drives down defects & costs

Hertzler systems established an integration process between GainSeeker and Exacto Incorporated’s ERP system. Now scrap data from the ERP system is automatically extracted and loaded into GainSeeker. Exacto leadership can now quickly spot trends in the data, and drill down to the root cause of scrap problems, eliminating long delays.

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GainSeeker ® Real-time SPC Eliminates Costly Guessing

Situation Senior Flexonics – GA Precision, Wisconsin, uses leading-edge technology to manufacture turned and complex metal components for the Aerospace, Medical, Construction, Agricultural, and Automotive markets. No dependable method existed for determining the tool...

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GainSeeker® Suite: Easy – Done

“GainSeeker is a great fit. It seamlessly installs and integrates to existing systems. I was able to install it myself without involving IT. Hertzler Systems and GainSeeker Suite made it easy.”

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Snack Chips Aren’t Cheap

GainSeeker Score Cards for each worker at the end of each shift increased accountability and visibility at this snack chip manufacturing company. The company realized a Return on Investment in well under year. It’s an investment that will continue to produce savings for years to come.

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SPC Software: A sensible investment (Full version)

Calculating a credible ROI in any industry can be a daunting task. Real-time alarms and automated data collection advanced multiple efforts for one Lean Six Sigma-driven quality manager of a consumer goods packaging company. It was an investment that in the end, just made sense.

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Setting the “data jockey” free (Short version)

The quality and engineering teams for a tier-one exterior automotive lighting systems supplier dramatically increased the reliability of their collected data and their credibility with their customer in using GainSeeker automated reports. Meanwhile, costs and efforts required to properly service the customer were reduced.

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Setting the “data jockey” free (Full version)

The quality and engineering teams for a tier-one exterior automotive lighting systems supplier dramatically increased the reliability of their collected data and their credibility with the customer by using GainSeeker automated reports. Meanwhile, costs and efforts required for properly servicing the customer were reduced.

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Creating a data-driven, fix-to-root-cause culture (Full version)

Why would a company invest in technology when most businesses were entrenching in 2008? All the indicators pointed one direction; Crown leadership chose another. Nonetheless, the first six months of using GainSeeker, they reported a 171% ROI, 98% of which was derived from increased throughput and improved first pass yield. The other 2% came from reduced costs in data collection. . . .

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GainSeeker® Suite turns art into science at baking company (Short version)

Consolidated Biscuit Company (CBC), which produces and packages a combined 100 million cookies and snack products daily at one plant, found a safe method for reducing the amount of product they were giving away in their packaging processes. CBC realized substantial savings and a complete ROI on GainSeeker software, which helped to substantially reduce their overpack.

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GainSeeker® Suite turns art into science at baking company (Full version)

Whether the snacks are being made at home or in the 730,000-square-foot McComb, Ohio, facility of Consolidated Biscuit Company (CBC), the process is the same: Raw ingredients are mixed into a dough that is rolled out and cut into shapes, baked in ovens, cooled in lines, then carefully packed to retain its fresh-baked flavor….

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Real-time Data Drives a Hole-in-one (Short version)

Long-time GainSeeker user and sporting goods giant Titleist needed a formalized system for rating raw materials and supplier performance for its golf ball manufacturing division, Acushnet. The company now tracks supplier quality for the top 80 percent of their purchasing dollars, in addition to tracking production quality data with great results.

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Real-time Data Drives a Hole-in-one (Full version)

In this magazine article, Plastics Business magazine examines Hertzler customer Acushnet (Titleist) Company’s application of SPC using GainSeeker Suite. Ken Welchman, Director of Corporate Quality, says “When you are The #1 Ball In Golf, everyone is gunning for you . . . The quality of our products is judged every day by the best golfers in the world.”

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Hormel Foods Weight Control Program – Video Presentation

Marty A. Slagel, Corporate Staff Quality, Hormel Foods, gave a compelling presentation to the Aberdeen Group’s “Manufacturing in the 21st Century” conference, December 2008, in Boston, Massachusetts. Hormel Foods has been a GainSeeker user for several years. You can access the video and view his presentation.

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Acushnet Supplier Improvement Program (Short version)

Long-time GainSeeker user and sporting goods giant Titleist needed a formalized system for rating raw materials and supplier performance for its golf ball manufacturing division, Acushnet. The company now tracks supplier quality for the top 80 percent of their purchasing dollars, in addition to tracking production quality data with great results.

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Acushnet Supplier Improvement Program – Live Audio Podcast

Ken Welchman, director of quality, Golf Ball Operations, Acushnet Company (Titleist), gave a compelling presentation at the IQPC Six Sigma Summit in Orlando, Florida, in January 2008. It is a fascinating glimpse at what makes Titleist the #1 Ball in Golf. Titleist is a long-time GainSeeker user.

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Walking the talk – Empowering people with data (Full version)

This article describes how the Six Sigma effort at Micropump and Hertzler Systems’ software solutions have come together to yield outstanding results. Micropump ‘Walks the Talk’ when it comes to providing data to drive decisions. Micropump, a unit of IDEX Corporation, is a leader in product innovation and also a leader in innovation in Operational Excellence.

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GainSeeker® OPC solution boosts OEE from 65% to 75% (Full version)

“In a data driven society, automated data collection is a must,” says John Foley, Network Administrator for Engineering Systems, of Pollak-APD (Actuator Products Division) a Stoneridge, Inc company. “The quicker we get information in hand, the better-off we are.” With this idea in mind, Hertzler Systems recently added some major new functionality to GainSeeker® SPC: support for OPC (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control).

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Down-time Analysis Reduces Waste

Over a six-month period, GainSeeker helped a department of a transmission components supplier reduce the number of work days by two that it needed to keep up with production demands each week. Meanwhile, output increased by 25% as defects and scrap were minimized.

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Controlling Net Contents and Reducing Give-Away

Consolidated Biscuit Company (CBC) has used Control Charts for years, but the culture of process control is now permeating the company like the smell of cookies baking. The cost savings attributed to not giving away unnecessary amounts of product is substantial.

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McCormick Flavor Division reduces overpack and material costs by 10-30%

“Of all the plants in the McCormick Flavor Division, our plant is consistently at the top of the list for efficiency of material usage, and by a substantial margin. We trace that directly back to our use of the Hertzler [GainSeeker] software,” John Campbell, quality manager, McCormick Flavor Division of McCormick & Company, Inc.

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