Sugar Packaging Ramps up at Gramercy Refinery

Every day for the last seven weeks a full-time team of employees at Imperial Sugar Company’s sugar refinery in Gramercy, Louisiana, has come together to improve its packaging process.

The result: increased line speed and throughput in some areas by up to 25 percent, with a 40 percent reduction of sugar losses.

Gramercy refinery's first DMAIC team. (Back Row l-r) Kelly Salassi, Keith Marengo, Blake Boe, (Front Row l-r) Janelle Poche, Tara Louque and Wade Faucheux. Team members not pictured are Dale Arceneaux and John Gerace.

“From the beginning, we believed it was possible to make a step change in throughput for a gain of at least 10 percent,” said Ralph Clements, vice president of manufacturing and engineering for Imperial. “The Gramercy team has demonstrated that and more.”

Gramercy Plant Manager Raylene Carter explained the genesis of the packaging improvement initiative. “John Sheptor, our CEO, wanted us to move toward a Six Sigma environment and engage our employees more in the process of operational improvement.” (Six Sigma is a business management strategy designed to improve manufacturing processes and eliminate defects.)

With that in mind, Clements – a long-time champion of Six Sigma disciplines – and Carter brought in an outside consultant last summer to do an initial assessment and help get things rolling.

“The particular approach we took was developed by Hagen and Associates, which used some trademarked techniques that made DMAIC – a Six Sigma tool – very powerful,” said Clements.

DMAIC is an improvement methodology that stands for define, measure, analyze, improve and control – and is used to root out and eliminate operational defects and bottlenecks.

“This methodology really teaches you how to understand what’s causing a failure – or series of failures – and determine what your operation’s true potential is,” said Carter. “One of the things we were really focused on was identifying and understanding output bottlenecks and how to eliminate them.”

The team, which pulled machine operators, mechanics, supervisors and others away from their regular day jobs, started work in January, beginning with two and a half days of training. Other employees at the plant picked up the slack by working extended 12-hour shifts.

The task at hand was to make improvements in the small packaging operation, where bags are filled with refined sugar and moved along on a conveyor system for palletization.

“In a typical operating environment, when there’s a problem on the line, most operators tend to slow things down to make the process more manageable,” explained Keith Marengo, Imperial packaging supervisor. “One of the things we learned in training was instead of slowing the machine down to see the problem less, you speed up the machine to see the problem more so you can identify and solve it.”

Stop watches are used for speed trials on the production line.

The team conducted several speed trials and lost-time studies on the production lines to surface problems and eventually determine the equipment’s maximum operating speed – without incurring sugar spillage or compromising safety and the quality of packaging.

For each trial they recorded every production stop, the duration of the stop and the reason for the stop. They also recorded packaging rejects and sugar spillage.

In one instance, they found small amounts of sugar being diverted when some of the bags were being filled. While the amount of sugar was almost immeasurable, the spillage can add up after thousands of bags.

With some modifications, not only was spillage virtually eliminated, but the improvement also resulted in a 13-percent increase in production speed.

One permanent outcome of the team’s work was a change in the daily production sheets. Operators are now required to record what speed their machine is running, what time a speed is changed, what the speed was changed to and why. They also must notify their supervisor when a change needs to be made – all to make sure the machine is running at the optimum speed it was designed to run.

“Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is become more efficient and waste less product,” said John Gerace, packaging team manager. “If you can do that, the machine runs better and there’s less work for the operators in terms of jams and cleanup activities. Plus there’s a drop in costs and an increased potential for business. That’s really what we’re all about, to improve our costs, quality and safety so we can attract more business.”

The team learned some key lessons that will help improve plant operations over the long term.

“You’re always going to have down time. You’re going to have conveyors breaking, power outages or something where a machine goes down,” said Marengo. “But the key is, when the machine is running, to keep it running efficiently at the speed it’s designed to run at.”

Marengo also pointed out that line operators are so busy with daily production, they can’t adequately address the problems that crop up – a mindset they’ve come to accept.

“This team has given us the time and ability to study lines, study machines, understand how they work and see things that are restricting production and efficiency. The more people that are exposed to this type of training here, the more mindsets we can change. And that will lead to more improvement within the plant.”

With its work concluded, the team has moved from a full-time cycle to an improvement cycle, where each day begins with a 20-minute meeting to discuss production status within the last 24 hours. Action items are identified and then checked for progress the next day, when the whole cycle starts over.

Blake Boe does randon weight check on packages from the production line.

All on the team agree that a lot of progress has been made, with still more to be done. The same improvement process is planned for the plant’s refining operation and brown sugar packaging.

Perhaps Blake Boe, a Bosch machine operator and mechanic at the plant for six years, summed it up best: “I’d put this whole project next to one of my favorite wrenches as a good tool for troubleshooting. Most important is more exposure to the other employees to get them all involved.”

Members of the Gramercy packaging improvement team are: John Gerace, packaging team manager; Tara Louque, technical clerk; Blake Boe, Bosch operator; Janelle Poche, Fawema operator 2; Keith Marengo, packaging supervisor; Wade Faucheux, packaging supervisor; Dale Arceneaux, packaging mechanic tech 1 and leaderman; and Kelly Salassi, electrical and instrumentation supervisor, River Parish Contractors.

The DMAIC Methodology

Improvement teams use the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology to root out and eliminate operational defects and bottlenecks:

Define a problem or improvement opportunity.

Measure process performance.

Analyze the process to determine the root causes of poor performance; determine whether the process can be improved or should be redesigned.

Improve the process by attacking root causes.

Control the improved process to hold the gains.