Lay the Bags Flat

An experience we once had with a food manufacturer involved the automatic case pack team. Team members came from various departments – sales, manufacturing, and so on. The company was trying to capitalize on an opportunity to reduce costs substantially. They had about 10% of its manufacturing labor force packing bags of potato chips by hand into cardboard cartons – a very expensive and boring job. They were trying to find a way to pack the bags automatically, but having many different plants with various manual packing facilities made it difficult to develop one single, uniform system. An outside vendor had offered a new method of efficient automatic case packing no matter what the plant differences were. The only hitch was that it would require laying the bags of potato chips flat inside the cartons instead of stanading them upright. This seemed like a great opportunity but implementation was stalled. 

The strategy to increase innovation throughout the company included asking me to help high profile teams who were spinning their wheels unable to align different departmental objectives for the progress of the company as a whole. This was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how Simplexity could work to help teams solve problems faster and accelerate productivity. 

After diverging in fact-finding, the team began to converge on two key facts: 

1. The members of the manufacturing team were excited as the new method would reduce manufacturing costs by about 30%, a huge cost saving that was technically easy to implement. 
2. But the members of the sales team were opposed to laying the bags flat. The company’s main advantage over its competition was its unique store delivery system. Upon delivery, the grocer always counted the bags in the case before paying the driver. Therefore, bags laid flat would take longer to count, slowing the drivers, who now wouldn’t be able to meet their daily number of sales call objectives. 

So, both teams agreed that there were two key facts: the new method could reduce manufacturing costs by 30%, and the grocer needed to quickly determine that the right number of bags were in the case.

In step three, problem definition, the team turned the facts into a series of challenges and then converged upon one that they liked best: How might we lay the bags flat in a way that enables the grocer to count them quickly? 

In the remaining steps, idea finding, evaluate and select, plan, gain acceptance, and action, the team ended up with several possible solutions. For example, give the grocer a scale to measure the correct weight and avoid counting at all. The team eventually chose one to implement that increased productivity both in manufacturing and sales.