Learning How to Solve Unsolvable Problems

Simon Keighley has become a familiar face around the large Imperial Sugar refinery complex at Port Wentworth, Ga., teaching new approaches to problem solving. His style is more like that of a coach working with a team.

He likes to say that he helps people learn how to solve problems they thought were unsolvable.

Keighley is a business advisor with Hagen and Company focuses on the little things that happen in a manufacturing plant and identifies hidden problems that no one may have known about. Then, he works with teams to find appropriate solutions that not only improve efficiency but directly and favorably improve profitability.

The process used has the acronym, DMIAC, a proven project methodology that has five phases:

Define the problem.
Measure key aspects of the current process and collect relevant data.
Analyze the data to investigate and verify cause-and-effect relationships.
Improve the current process based on data analysis.
Control the future process to ensure that any deviations from target are corrected.

Hagen and Company helps companies increase performance and cut costs by eliminating manufacturing and processing problems. Clients include Coca-Cola, BP, Kimberly-Clark, Alcoa, BHP and BASF, in addition to Imperial Sugar.

Simon Keighley, a business advisor withHagen and Company, on the floor at Imperial Sugar's Port Wentwoth plant.

The process begins by ranking problems by value to the business, the actual dollar value. Then, drilling down on what’s most important to profitability of the business that needs to be fixed first.

For example, how to reduce or eliminate shutdowns of a mechanized packaging facility or assembly line or finding ways to eliminate even the slightest waste in food packaging.

Keighley believes that quality can always be improved, and he works together with teams to deliver the “next level of quality,” as he calls it, and to make the results sustainable and embedded into the work culture of the organization.