Reaching True Potential in Production of Pure Sugar

7.2 million pounds … That’s how much sugar the Imperial Sugar refinery at Port Wentworth is capable of producing daily, with every single station working efficiently, in perfect lock-step, without a cup of sugar lost.

Closing the gap between current production rates and that perfect 7.2 million figure is the mission of Simon Keighley, a consultant for Hagen & Co. Keighley arrived in February to help Port Wentworth teams break through bottlenecks and improve performance.

Closing the gap between current production rates and that perfect 7.2 million figure is the mission of Simon Keighley, a consultant for Hagen & Co.

Hagen & Co. has a 20-year history of harnessing untapped potential for companies ranging from Coca-Cola to BP. The company’s consultants are known for their ability to help multidisciplinary teams crack long-standing unsolvable problems — the problems that have been around for so long that employees believe they’ll never go away. Hagen & Co. reports that, as a result, they’ve saved clients an average of $3 million to $5 million per plant, per year.

At Port Wentworth, where the refinery is still ramping up to full production since reopening in November 2009, the challenge is bringing all stations up to maximum output without down time or waste, 24 hours a day.

“That’s why we engaged Hagen & Co.,” says Refinery Manager Jim Flynn. “We’ve put together a team of eight to work with Simon, and they’re taking a very structured, focused approach to working through problems. We knew that with Hagen’s rigorous problem-solving approach and our employees’ experience, we’d have a good combination.”

Hagen & Co.’s proprietary problem-solving approach – which the company calls “Control Factor Analysis” – falls within the proven production efficiency framework of the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process, which comes from the industry disciplines of Six Sigma.

Keighley’s task is to train teams of employees in the technique, which methodically isolates and remedies root causes of any and all production problems.

For Port Wentworth teams to learn the ropes of DMAIC, they’ll have to work through challenging details, including to determine how to make refined sugar whiter, how to remove current bottlenecks and how to use water more efficiently throughout the refinery. The process will require doing time studies, measuring data and analyzing data using Control Factor Analysis. Each day, the team will determine what next steps they need to take, whether they are gathering more data or putting a solution in place.

Simon Keighley (L) and Stephen Downey are consultants for Hagen & Co. Keighley advises Imperial Sugar at the Port Wentworth plant near Savannah, Ga. while Downey is assigned to Imperial Sugar at Gramercy, La.

With training and experience under their belts, DMAIC team members will go back to their work stations knowing how to solve everyday problems using the DMAIC process, and spreading the culture of DMAIC to their colleagues.

“What we say at the start of a project is, not only will we deliver an improvement that’s bigger than you expect, but you’ll have a team of people who understand what’s different about how they’ve worked in the past few weeks,” says Keighley. “And they’ll be role models for driving continuous improvement, using the techniques they’ve learned.”

Data pointing to increased production and efficiency at Port Wentworth is now beginning to come in, with a 30 percent increase in throughput in the last 6 weeks. But refinery manager Jim Flynn doesn’t need data to confirm what he has already noticed — that bringing together six operators from different stations within the refinery has gone a long way toward fostering increased work communications and efficiencies.

“One person’s station might be suffering because of the way another person runs his station,” Flynn says. “But thanks to the hybrid nature of these teams, operators can solve problems together. That’s one reason people want to be on these teams: It’s an effective process.

“You can see things changing right before your eyes.”