Coffee Roaster Halves Saturday Overtime, Revitalizing Employee Morale and Saving $600K/year
A leading national coffee company was struggling with unhappy employees due to required Saturday overtime. Over the past year, production demand had grown. Amidst the increasing number of orders, CoffeeCo* seemed to be facing unavoidable challenges every week, a broken grinder, operators calling in sick, and severe weather which forced Saturday overtime. Managers and operators alike were tired of working 6 days a week. They were worn out and morale was dropping.
Leadership knew if they couldn’t reduce overtime soon people would start to leave leading to employee shortages, more overtime, and a continued decrease in morale.
CoffeeCo created a plan to increase their throughput. They set more aggressive production targets and worked to solve downtime problems as they came up, but it wasn’t enough. The only viable options seemed to be capital investment and automation, which were both expensive and had a 12+ month lead time. The plant needed solutions faster than capital could provide so they called Stroud.
Stroud and CoffeeCo assembled an improvement team of plant operators and leadership that was tasked with tackling this seemingly impossible challenge to eliminate Saturday overtime. To begin improving, the team needed the facts. They gathered stop watches, clipboards, and went out to the manufacturing floor. While studying the line, the team occasionally saw the line go down for a mechanical issue or an upstream delay.
However, they concluded that these downtime problems were just highly visible distractions concealing the most valuable opportunity: increasing the packaging line’s speed.
The challenge now was no one wanted to work on speed. Leadership thought higher speed meant their already exhausted employees would be working harder and faster exacerbating the morale problem. Common knowledge in the plant was the line was limited by manual packing, and the equipment was already outpacing the people.
Armed with the facts from their line studies, the machine operators on the team were able to correct this long-held belief. People were outpacing the equipment. Their studies showed that the packers were waiting over 15 seconds out of each minute-long cycle for the sealing machine. With this new insight, the team focused resources on sealing the coffee bags faster.
The team reexamined the sealing machine’s programming, and with support from both maintenance and quality, successfully eliminated unnecessary pauses, improved the airflow process, and ultimately, sealed the coffee bags much faster.
Within 4 weeks, the team had enabled the line to run 25% faster and saved CoffeeCo hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in Saturday overtime costs.
50% reduction in Saturday overtime costs.
Even more valuable than the financial savings was the change in CoffeeCo’s atmosphere. Operators and managers alike were overjoyed at the overtime reduction. CoffeeCo’s Friday atmosphere transformed from a feeling of resentment that Saturdays were another working day, to excitement about the weekend ahead.
Tangible improvements in company morale.
*We take our client’s confidentiality seriously - the names are fictional but the results are real.
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