Solving a Food Manufacturer’s Critical Problem
It’s Raining Dough!
Fall is a busy time of the year for food manufacturers, with Thanksgiving and other holidays driving up demand and putting stress on their workforce. This was especially the case for a plant we worked with that was ramping up its production of dough products.
There was a not-so-small problem - the dough wasn’t making it from the line into packages. Instead, it was dropping onto the floor from the packaging line.
How bad was it?
Dough dropping accounted for 1/3 of the downtime on the packaging machine due to unscheduled cleaning and kickoffs from lightweight packages.
Over $100k/yr. in labor from downtime spent cleaning the line and reworking materials.
Over $300k/yr. in scrap and material waste.
Many ergonomics complaints and injuries from workers dumping out packages.
It was a huge detriment to morale, a weekly conversation topic, and headache for management and staff.
Past teams struggled to identify a true root cause, and discussions often quickly led to blame. Instead of guessing and checking, Stroud uses a first principles-based problem-solving approach to eliminate potential red herrings and avoid making assumptions that may hide critical details quickly and efficiently. This starts with observing the problem at its source:
When dough was dropping, a consistent flow came off of the cutter.
Dough would drop regardless of the shift of the day.
Dropping happened regardless of whether the cutter was moving or not.
The dough was sagging and slipping out of the cutter.
Dough was dropping only on one type of product, but not all the time.
Countless aspects between two recipes may contribute to this - from machine settings to ingredients to the sequence these products are scheduled.
Eliminating the Problem
Our problem-solving approach involves breaking down the problem into related variables, allowing the team to systematically organize and test potential root causes and quickly rule out areas of investigation based on the pattern of failure.
The data showed that we had a problem with our dough recipe - it was too soft! A Farinograph was used to measure the torque needed to mix the dough and showed that the dough was much softer when dropping.
Many things can make dough soft - from the ingredients added to the specific machine settings used to mix and shape the dough. The simplest solution was to reduce the amount of water used, creating a slightly stiffer dough without sacrificing the taste or quality of the final product. The result?
An immediate impact to the line - dough dropping completely disappeared.
Sustaining the Improvement
Working with the site QA team, we updated their specifications to the new recipe within a week. You could immediately see a difference with the team on the production floor - no more dough falling meant less time spent shaking out packages and sweeping floors, and a lot less stress to meet daily targets.
*Normalized to equivalent production hours
Solving this problem also unlocked additional speed improvements, helping the line increase its throughput by over 10% and reducing raw material usage by nearly 5%.
The most impactful outcome for the team, however, was learning how to sustain the improvement. Past improvement efforts all led back to a financial metric. While cost is critical to the success of a plant, it’s driven by multiple factors and too far removed from an individual problem, making it hard to respond when a problem reoccurs.
By tying the problem of dough dropping to a directly measurable value, the Farinograph torque, the team was able to easily communicate the problem and drive leadership towards action. Having a visible metric also allowed operators to directly monitor the process and react before the problem reoccurs.
