By definition, safety is a never-ending commitment. It’s a mindset that is reflected in the actions of every worker, as well as by leaders who invest in ongoing programs to make safety an integral part of operations. Such is the case at Imperial Sugar Company’s newly rebuilt sugar refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia.

“Safety was designed into the rebuild from the beginning,” said Ron Allen, Imperial’s senior director of environmental safety, health and quality. “The plant startup was a major undertaking for us, and we tried to make sure there was no stone unturned. But our safety initiatives didn’t end there. We’re constantly engaging outside assistance to ensure we haven’t overlooked anything.”

As part of its ongoing efforts to head off process safety hazards, the plant at Port Wentworth has opened its doors to third party experts who inspect and critique every aspect of its operations.

Most recently, international safety experts from Chilworth Global visited the Port Wentworth plant. Chilworth provides process safety services to most of the world’s largest chemical, pharmaceutical, food stuffs, agrochemical, and oil/petrochemical companies.

Some of the things Chilworth checked at Port Wentworth included:

• Explosion vents and whether or not they were adequately sized
• Alarm systems to make sure they were properly designed and operating
• Conveyance systems to assess any dust hazards
• Suppression and chemical isolation systems to ensure responsiveness against explosions

The visit was a follow-on to an in-depth process hazard analysis conducted months ago based on the plant’s plans and specifications. That initial review was led by Fluor consultants. Many others participated, including Chilworth process safety specialists, engineers from the Dennis Group, equipment suppliers (e.g., Fike – the company that produced much of the explosion suppression and isolation equipment used in the rebuild), and Imperial’s own safety people, engineers, operators, and maintenance technicians.

“We partnered with Chilworth as a technical check-and-balance to our safety systems,” said Jeffries. “We’re doing the upfront work, but want to make sure our initial assumptions are validated by respected authorities in the field.”

According to Allen, people who have toured the plant since it was rebuilt have called Port Wentworth the benchmark for combustible dust management in America.

Imperial is actively sharing its combustible dust management experiences and insights with other interested parties. Last fall, Imperial hosted the the sugar industry’s first-ever combustible dust safety symposium. And on April 22, the company will host a day-long conference on combustible dust safety for customers at its Port Wentworth refinery.

The company also is taking its safety story on the road. Allen will make a presentation at a combustible dust safety workshop for the American Industrial Hygiene Association. Another similar presentation will be made to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in the Fall. Some of Imperial’s insights on the topic were featured recently in the Association’s NFPA Journal.

[Feature story about Imperial Sugar's Ron Allen in NFPA Journal.]

While Imperial’s Port Wentworth plant is one of the safest and most modern refineries around, both Jeffries and Allen admit there’s always room for improvement.

“You can never be too safe,” said Allen. “We will continue to conduct audits and evaluations on a periodic basis, using a number of vendors to keep our objectivity fresh.”

The Miami Herald reports – Backers say the purchase is critical for Everglades restoration efforts. Critics, meanwhile, characterize it as a sweetheart deal for an otherwise financially strapped company and the law firm that represents it.

Click here for the full story.

Christine Knezevich, Environmental, Health, Safety, Quality and Food Safety team manager, discusses sugar sample with lab technician John Smith, Jr.

In an earlier century, Christine Knezevich’s trailblazing great-grandmother wore trousers and worked on the railroads in Pennsylvania. In this century, Knezevich is blazing trails of her own as she helps lay down safety initiatives at Imperial Sugar Company’s state-of-the-art Port Wentworth refinery.

As the Environmental, Health, Safety, Quality and Food Safety team manager, Knezevich is at the center of a matrix of responsibilities. Reducing the accident rate, ensuring that customers have a safe product, interfacing with regulatory agencies, launching sustainability efforts — all fall within her purview.

“The questions I try to answer are … How can we make our facilities even safer? How do we protect the environment? How is the regulatory environment changing? How can we distinguish ourselves in our customers’ minds? What value-added services can we offer them?” she says. “In a competitive marketplace, these sorts of initiatives are crucial.”

Lab Technician Charles Davis keeps track of sugar testing.

One way she has brought value to customers, for example, has been to pursue voluntary food-safety certifications for Port Wentworth. In December, the refinery earned Safe Quality Food (SQF) Level 2 certification, which Knezevich says is of significant value to customers, especially in an era of heightened consumer concerns over food safety. By the end of this year, she hopes to have achieved SQF Level 3 certification — the highest available.

“It guarantees a certain quality level to our customers, as well as demonstrating the measures that we take toward protecting the safety of our sugar,” she says. “That’s very important to our customers, especially large customers, like Walmart and Kroger.”

Florida cane sugar

Gov. Charlie Crist fired back today at critics who pummeled him for a $536 million Everglades land deal that they describe as a giveaway to U.S. Sugar Corp.

When Crist announced Florida’s $1.75 billion plan nearly two years ago to save the Everglades by buying out a major landowner, United States Sugar, he declared that the deal would be remembered as a public acquisition “as monumental as the creation of the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone.”

Now, the governor’s ambitious plan to reclaim the river of grass, as the famed wetlands are known, is instead on track to rescue the fortunes of United States Sugar.

Read the full story in The New York Times.

More big-name food and beverage products—including Kraft Foods Inc.’s Wheat Thins —have begun dropping the ingredient in favor of sugar, despite a big difference in cost, saying they are responding to consumer preferences for ingredients perceived as more natural.

Read the full story – click here.

Andy Briscoe, President & CEO of the Sugar Association at an industry meeting.

After years of getting a bad rap, sugar usage – and demand – are on the rebound.

World sugar prices are the highest they’ve been since 1982 – around 30 cents a pound as of this writing. The current price partly reflects decreased production from some of the world’s largest sugar producing countries because of weather problems or poor crop conditions. But there’s something else afoot that could keep demand strong in the months ahead.

Consumers increasingly are on the lookout for natural sweeteners, and major food and beverage manufacturers are responding with a return to sugar-based products.

Andy Briscoe, President & CEO of the Sugar Association, shared his thoughts on the resurgence of sugar in a recent interview with ISC Newsroom.com:

What are some of the key factors behind the uptick in sugar usage?

Eighty percent or more of all foods and beverages are purchased because of taste. So the primary driver in my mind is people like and demand the quality taste of sugar. Sugar is also a natural sweetener and has been safely used for more than 2,000 years.

Why the increased interest in sugar now?

Today, more than ever, consumers want to know what they are eating and what they are feeding their families. Sugar is a time-tested and safe sweetener – a natural ingredient shoppers can pronounce. And we know consumers prefer natural ingredients.

For the same reason, I think there’s a growing negative perception around the use of chemical artificial sweeteners. Today, the U.S. has 27 sweeteners and many of them are man-made, chemical sweeteners.

The Sugar Association recently conducted a Harris Interactive poll of 1200 parents in the U.S. and found half of the parents did not want their children consuming artificially sweetened products. We also found most parents could not identify the sweeteners that are in their children’s foods.

While sugar consumption has been targeted as a scapegoat for childhood obesity, an Institute of Medicine study of carbohydrates in 2002 reported the data available on dental caries, behavior, cancer and risk of obesity shows there is insufficient evidence to set an upper level for total or added sugars. The same lack of evidence was re-confirmed in a European Food Safety Authority scientific review in March 2009.

How did the introduction of high fructose corn syrup affect the demand for sugar?

Around 1980, high fructose corn syrup was rapidly replacing sugar in U.S. soft drinks and beverages. As a result, the sugar industry lost about 2.5 million tons in annual deliveries to beverages during the next six years. It’s taken us from 1986, when deliveries hit bottom, to climb back up to about 10.5 million tons in total U.S. deliveries in 2008 and 2009 (see attached WASDE chart and Total U.S. Sugar Deliveries 1980-2008 chart).

While overall demand for sugar is back up, the actual per capita consumption of sugar has gone down about 40 percent since 1970. That is partly due to population increase, but also because of other caloric sweeteners coming into the marketplace, such as high fructose corn syrup, glucose syrup, dextrose, etc. This reduction in sugar consumption has occurred at the same time the obesity rate has tripled (see attached chart). So this definitely shows sugar has not been the cause of obesity as some have inferred.

In what ways is sugar making a comeback today?

Several food and beverage manufacturers are switching from the use of high fructose corn syrup to sugar – Snapple, Gatorade, Pepsi Throwback, Heritage Dr Pepper. Most recently, Heinz announced a move back to sugar with their Simply Heinz product. Consumer preference, taste, and sugar being all natural are the key drivers for these switches.

There’s also a major trend among manufacturers to simplify product ingredients – to have five or less ingredients helps reduce confusion for consumers. The idea is to get back to contents people can recognize and feel comfortable feeding their children. Consumers should not have to have a chemistry degree to be able to read the ingredients on some of today’s labels. Sugar, however, is a natural ingredient people quickly recognize and trust.

What does the future hold for the sugar industry?

We’re already into 2010 and everything still looks strong for current usage trends.

Usually, in the sugar industry, when demand exceeds production, the farmers rise to the occasion either by planting more or doing what they can to increase the yield of their crops. This cycle takes about 18 months or so, which gets us through one growing season. This last year, for example, U.S. beet and cane growers increased production by roughly five percent on average. If demand continues to be strong, growers will continue their efforts to increase acreage and production as best they can.

So whether it’s 2011, 2012 or longer when production catches up to demand, I don’t know. Today, I don’t have any sense of sugar demand tracking down, at least for the near term.

As an industry, I’d like to think we’re in a better position demand-wise than we’ve been in the last 25 or 30 years. We’ve cycled back to where we were in 1980. I would assume most sugar growers and processors are pleased. The Sugar Association will continue to work hard for the industry – to promote sugar as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle.

(More information about sugar and the Sugar Association can be found at www.sugar.org.)

With the planting season beginning this month, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco heard arguments on a food safety group’s request for a temporary ban on planting genetically engineered sugar beet crops and selling modified sugar beet seeds. He said he would rule “expeditiously” and before ending the hearing told lawyers for Monsanto, farmers and industry groups “there are going to be permanent remedies in this case.”

Click here for the full story.

The U.S. needs to be “more aggressive” in taking steps to increase raw-sugar shipments by 1 million metric tons “from now through the summer,” Imperial Sugar Chief Executive Officer John C. Sheptor said.

Read full article at Bloomberg.com

Simon Keighley of Hagen & Co. identifies equipment to be examined or tested.

First the refinery team dissolves the sugar into a syrup that resembles a straw-colored solution, then filters out color impurities by passing the sugar solution through columns holding charcoal, or “char” — time-proven equipment that dates back to the early 1900s.

What the refinery team began to observe, though, was that during high production of sugar, the color analysis reported by the lab of the concentrated sugar syrup flowing out of the char was degrading.

“We could predict that by a certain date that we wouldn’t be able to produce white sugar to meet finished product specifications at the 6,200,000 pounds-per-day rate,” says Refinery Manager Jim Flynn. “Color is one of the reasons our production is constrained.”

Getting to the root of the issue meant reexamining their decades-old process for making sugar.

That’s why Imperial Sugar contracted Hagen & Co., a consulting firm that has fine-tuned a problem-solving technique to help teams improve performance.

“The process we’re going through now requires rigorous analysis to get to the root of our color problem. And — as we’re learning in this process — the root of a problem often is not what you think it is initially,” says Flynn.

Hagen & Co.’s proprietary technique, called “Control Factor Analysis,” falls within the framework of the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process, which hails from Six Sigma. The technique focuses on finding out which part of a process — or which “control factor” — is off kilter, then takes steps to solve the problem.

Eight highly experienced Port Wentworth workers, plucked from different areas of the refinery, have come together to form the DMAIC team. Imperial Sugar’s President and CEO John Sheptor joined the group, not as top executive but rather utilizing his career as an engineer and to deliver resources needed to speed the process. A number of corrective actions have been implemented as a result of his ideas.

Their goal: To make sugar that is consistently purer than anything else on the market, while bringing cost-saving efficiencies and streamlined systems.

Every morning for the past four weeks, this DMAIC team has huddled at 6:30 a.m. in a room deep inside the sugar refinery. The walls are plastered with large Post-It sheets listing next action steps and processes that need addressing. Simon Keighley of Hagen & Co. stands before the group, facilitating. The group runs through the previous day’s action steps, then identifies what needs to be examined or tested next.

The team has spent the past four weeks working through 200 different actions to pinpoint char-house issues and improve production. While it is not unusual for a sugar refinery to strive for constant purity, Imperial Sugar’s approach is to examine and profoundly improve a decades-old process.

“We started by inspecting the symptoms more closely than anyone had inspected them before,” explains Keighley. “We looked at the facts of the situation. We didn’t make any assumptions.”

After the first two weeks, the group had identified the top 10 factors affecting char-house production, ranging from poorly functioning equipment to the texture of the char itself.

“One thing we discovered, for example, was that the char wasn’t the same as it used to be, and we wondered why,” says Flynn. When char is fresh, it looks like course pepper. Over time, it breaks down into fine particles, which should be screened out by existing equipment. But the screens weren’t working properly.

With too many fine particles in the mix, it took longer for the sugar solution to flow through. (Imagine trying to flow liquid through course grain versus fine powder.) Output bottlenecked. “So you could try to decrease the sugar content of the solution, and increase your flow rate, but then it takes longer to boil down later in the process,” explains Keighley. Workers could try to do more sugar washing to get color out, but that meant some of the sugar would be lost and water wasted.

“The rate-limiting factor, then, were these particles,” says Keighley. “Removing the fine particles was critical to improving color and sugar content.”

The solution came in the form of equipment repair, as well as some process improvements. “What I thought was cool about this was that some of our team members came up with very creative solutions,” says Flynn.

One technician, Dean Jordan, devised an ingenious way to increase the rate at which certain char-house equipment was removed for cleaning then returned — allowing for increased production rates.

As a result, says Flynn, “We are seeing much better colors. That means, instead of slowing down to produce better color, we can maintain higher production rates and send more material to packaging.”

Both Keighley and Flynn see this process as the beginning of a culture shift. “We need dozens of teams like this in place, working on continuous improvements,” says Flynn. “Simon is working with us to develop ways of sustaining the structure we’ve started.”

“What we hope will come out of this is that we can move on and look at other stations in the plant and say, What problems do we see? And how can we stop them?” says Keighley. “We’ll use this as a stepping stone to assist with a training program throughout the plant.”

Members of the Port Wentworth DMAIC team are:
George Sexton, Operator, White Sugar Pan Boiler
Dean Jordan, Instrument Electrical Technician
Gerrad Kerby, Maintenance Mechanic
Ricky Kessler, Low-Grade Boiler Operator
Kerry Maennache, Affination Operator
John Burke, Shift Superintendent
Robert Wilkerson, White Sugar Melter Man
Michel Whitaker, Reliability Engineer

The ride is to honor the memory of the victims of the Imperial Sugar refinery explosion and fire, which occurred Feb. 7, 2008. It also will salute those who stepped up to help that night and in the following days.

The Red Knights call their event the Sugar Run and Public Safety Awareness Day. You don’t need to pre-register or even own a two-wheeler to join the ride.

Read the full story … click here.

“I was struck by how long employees have been here and how dedicated they are,' says Jim Flynn, who was hired as the new refinery manager in December 2009.

“That’s what first impressed me about Port Wentworth,” says Jim Flynn, who was hired as the new refinery manager in December 2009. “I was struck by how long employees have been here and how dedicated they are. Some of them were even born here, because on-site residences used to be leased to the employees.”

That’s one reason Flynn expected to meet with some resistance from the roughly 50 employees who report to him. “As I brought in fresh ideas, I thought I’d face a ‘We don’t need you to tell us how to make sugar’ attitude. But it’s not like that. People here are very open to new ideas,” he says

Flynn says his goal is to create a new culture that’s a “mix of old and new values.”

One of the first changes he aimed for was increasing the level of safety awareness among employees in the refinery, where raw sugar is washed, filtered and dried.

For example, he asks that all employees wear their personal protective equipment, such as hearing protection, throughout the refinery. “I want to be sure all employees have good hearing in their later years,” he says.

To keep safety top of mind, Flynn holds weekly safety meetings with all refinery employees and encourages workers to write near-miss reports. “A near-miss report is a good tool. If you have several close calls that are the same, you can identify a trend,” he says. “One thing I enjoy is how open the operators are to offer suggestions and make improvements.”

Flynn confers with control room operator Ricky Ussery.

Even as he stresses safety, Flynn is keenly aware of his target of producing six million pounds of sugar a day. To reach that goal, he’s going back to “fundamental” good manufacturing practices. When he first joined the management team, he noticed that equipment operators weren’t capturing key data from day to day. That’s when the simple idea of a log book and reading sheets emerged. It’s a basic concept: If you were manufacturing widgets, you’d want to keep track of how many widgets you made each day, how many were too big or small, how many needed adjustments to make them perfect.

“This gives us a historical, objective record, so we know what happened the day before or the week before, so we can see what changes would improve the process,” he says.

The entire department came together on a day when the refinery was shut down, with operators and engineers holding breakout sessions to identify each of the data to track in order to operate the facility more efficiently. “It was a very helpful exercise,” Flynn says. “And it built a bit of camaraderie too, because employees rarely have the chance to come together as a whole and exchange ideas.”

“I just hope I can make an impact and help everyone be safe and successful.”

Experts and industry groups say such an injunction could jeopardize U.S. sugar supplies, about half of which comes from the biotech beets planted on more than 1 million acres in 10 states stretching from Michigan to Oregon.

“It will be a big problem,” if the injunction is granted, said Carol Mallory-Smith, professor of weed science at Oregon State University. “The industry really had converted to this.”

The beets, engineered to be resistant to Monsanto’s popular herbicide Roundup, comprise 95 percent of the crop after two seasons of planting. All the seed comes from Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Organic farmers, food safety advocates and conservation groups already have won a lawsuit forcing federal authorities to reconsider their 2005 approval of the Roundup Ready beets for unrestricted use, saying the government failed to take a hard look at cross-pollination risks.

Read the full story.

Read the full story in USA Today. Click here.

Yvette Woodard, senior procurement manager, Imperial Sugar

That’s a procedural change put in place by Yvette Woodard, the senior procurement manager who oversees purchasing at the Port Wentworth and Gramercy refineries, as well as at headquarters in Sugar Land, Texas. “The process lets us determine the best route and gives us the option of saving money,” she says.

Setting up a bidding process — the opposite of a hurry-up-and-get-it-done process — is just one way the procurement department can bring value to an organization, she says.

“People often feel that requiring bids slows down the process,” she says. “The fact is, the process can go quickly and it drives saving. After Russ went through it the first time, he discovered that it was actually much easier. And he’s been a big proponent of the process ever since.”

Woodard brings over 20 years of procurement experience to her role, which entails thinking strategically about Imperial Sugar’s relationships with vendors.

“We’re putting contracts in place with vendors to establish a level of expectation, so that it’s more advantageous to Imperial Sugar and our customers,” she says. For example, an advantageous relationship for Imperial might provide more storage for consignment inventory, a different delivery schedule, or a higher quality of product arriving on site.

Yvette Woodard keeps in touch with vendors and suppliers during manager's meeting.

With the help of Human Resource Manager Ginger Faulconer, Vice President George Muller and Assistant General Counsel Kirsten Cohoon, Woodard has crafted new contracts with higher expectations for existing Port Wentworth and Gramercy vendors, and put them in vendors’ hands.

In some cases, she may forge new relationships with suppliers who can be strategic partners. “We want vendors who can bring something to the table,” she explains. “A partner who might say, ‘We’ve been making this package for you for years, but we’ve thought of a way to do it better.’”

Managing supplier relationships is something Woodard did in her previous life in the pharmaceuticals industry. When her former employer, Wyeth, introduced a new arthritic cap on Advil bottles, it was a vendor who brought the idea to the company. “Those are the kinds of things you want your supplier to do — bring you ideas in ways to save money in your order pattern or to package something differently, or to tell you about the latest, greatest thing.”

For example, Woodard says, she wants to know what the company’s suppliers are doing now to go green and what their sustainability plan is. “Do they have certification programs and standard operating procedures in place? Our customers are asking us about it,” she says, “so I’ll be asking about it.”

“The procurement department is ripe for opportunities. The challenge is going to be picking and choosing which opportunities we want to tackle first.”

Sugar cane field being cut by hand in Paraguay.

Social premiums go beyond the price paid for sugar and honey. They are funds sent directly and every quarter to the farmer cooperatives that sell to Wholesome. For example, a farming group in Malawi, one of the 20 poorest countries in the world, might sell sugar cane by the ton to a local mill for an agreed-upon price. Wholesome pays the mill for that sugar. Then the company goes a step further by direct-wiring a social premium — perhaps seven to nine cents per pound of sugar — to the farmers themselves.

“Farmers use the money for the benefit of the community — for projects that really impact people’s lives,” says Pauline McKee, vice president of marketing for Wholesome Sweeteners.

Wholesome is still the first and only Fair Trade sugar company in the United States. Since 2005, the company has been steadily building the market for Fair Trade Certified sweeteners, gearing its products toward “socially and environmentally concerned consumers,” says McKee. “Consumers’ increasing support of these products demonstrates their commitment to the larger cause.”

The “larger cause” is the concept of Fair Trade, which guarantees that farmers’ cooperatives are paid fairly and directly. Workers on a Fair Trade farm, for example, receive a fair market price for their produce and enjoy safe working conditions. Child labor is prohibited. And the structure of the system ensures that growers can compete with factory farms — while still practicing sustainable agriculture — and earn enough to buy their own land and send their kids to school.

“The Fair Trade system is also about the farmers’ being self-determining. A farmers’ cooperative is getting this money through their own work, and they’re making decisions together about how to benefit their own community,” says McKee.

Well dug in Malawi using Fair Trade premiums.

In Malawi, for example, farmers used social-premium funds to dig water wells, so that women no longer had to spend hours each day hauling water from a nearby village. In Paraguay, funds pre-financed trucks, allowing farmers to transport sugar cane to mills within 24 hours of cutting it.

Other farmers in Paraguay opted to put money toward creating a radio station, “because, of course, no one has cell phones,” explains McKee. “Now they can communicate and know what’s happening in their community by listening to the station.”

“The benefits of the Fair Trade Certified program have enormous impacts for our cooperative partners in Malawi, Mexico and Paraguay, and those benefits increase with every quarterly payment,” she adds. “Together, we really are making the world a sweeter place.”

Students crowd around Sheptor at end of his speech to ask questions. Tatiana Mirutenko (r) of Clemson and Emre Bar (center) of Virginia Tech listen to an answer.

John Sheptor, president and CEO of Imperial Sugar Company, issued a challenge to a group of university students attending the recent Business Today Conference in Austin, Tx.

Speaking on the widening gap between Wall Street and Main Street, Sheptor asked them: “Will you continue to allow the manufacturing sector to erode, or will you be the catalyst of recovery? Will you invest today for the sake of our next generation, or will you extract what you can before the ultimate failure of our economic model?”

Those comments were part of a keynote presentation Sheptor made at the February 20 conference where approximately 80 students from top universities around the country gathered to hear from business executives. The event was conducted by Business Today, a non-profit foundation run by undergraduates at Princeton University.

Sheptor answers students question during a twenty minute quizzing.

Panel discussions, seminars and keynote addresses were framed against the backdrop of the current financial meltdown and students’ potentially jaded attitudes toward big business regarding future career choices.

In his remarks, Sheptor told the audience that a vibrant manufacturing sector has preceded the development of every great economy and suggested that the retooling and growth of this sector would provide the basis for a turning point in our current economic crisis.

He went on to say that employees have been redefined as human capital where they were once considered a company’s most valued asset. “Our appetite for short term financial return has swayed our wisdom to sacrifice our future for what we can exploit today. We must urgently rebuild what we have allowed to erode away.”

Sheptor said those thoughts figured into Imperial’s decision to rebuild its refinery in Port Wentworth, near Savannah, Georgia, after a combustible dust explosion two years ago.

Amy Kao of Carnegie Mellon University listens intensely to remarks by Sheptor on the importance of manufacturing.

“We made the choice to rebuild and at the same time to invest in the future by renewing our technology and establishing new industry best practices,” he said. While the shutdown of the Port Wentworth refinery reduced the company’s earnings capacity by 50 percent for 22 months, Imperial kept all of the plant’s employees on the payroll during the entire rebuilding process.

Today, Port Wentworth boasts one of the most modern and safest sugar refineries in North America.

“It was uplifting to find a CEO that believes in the moral responsibility of a corporation,” said Amy Kao, a student at Carnegie Mellon University. “How he turned a time of crisis into an opportunity and added value for both the employees and stakeholders is remarkable. I hope to have the same opportunity in my career to put the that same resolve to work for both employees and stakeholders.”

Business Today is dedicated to fostering dialog and bridging the gap between students and an elite group of business leaders. Other executives participating in the event included Lawrence Dickerson, CEO of Diamond Offshore Drilling; Albert Reese, CFO of ATP Oil & Gas; Ed DiSalvo, CEO of LoneStar Overnight; and Lew Little, CEO of Harden Healthcare.

In September, federal Judge Jeffery White ordered USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to produce an environmental impact statement to support its deregulation of seed developer Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds.
The suit was filed in January 2008 by the Center for Food Safety, Organic Seed Alliance, Sierra Club and High Mowing Organic Seeds.

Now the court must decide whether, or under what circumstances, the seeds can be used in the meantime. White has scheduled a June hearing for litigants to argue whether the court should place an injunction on the industry’s use of the seeds.

Read the full story – click here.

Imperial Sugar now outfits its work force in FR clothing. Learn how and why FR clothing can best protect your own employees.

Approximately 700 Imperial Sugar workers — about 400 in the rebuilt Port Wentworth facility, as well as 300 at the company’s Grammercy, La., plant — must wear FR garments. All contractors and site visitors must don the protective clothing as well.

Read the full story in EHS Today. Click here.

Adding to the challenge, each machine operator has his or her own set of tools and tricks for making the necessary machine adjustments and troubleshooting problems that inevitably arise. Unique adjustments made by one operator, however, might complicate things for another one in the next shift.

Raylene Carter, manager of Imperial Sugar Company’s sugar refinery at Gramercy explained what was happening in the plant’s small packaging operation. “We discovered that different mechanics were fixing things differently. For example, they were making an adjustment that was supposed to be the width of the wrench. The trouble was, everyone used a different size wrench.”

Inconsistencies such as these can cause production line hiccups and unnecessary downtime in a fast-paced, demand-driven environment.

To make sure machine changeovers go off without a hitch, the Gramercy refinery is implementing a program that makes use of Lean Visual Factory techniques.

“The purpose of Lean Visual Factory is to keep things very visual and simple,” said Ralph Clements, vice president of manufacturing and engineering for Imperial. “It’s a technique where you use posters or illustrations to quickly explain operating or process instructions and keep workers from the time-consuming task of digging through a manual.”

Members of the Gramercy packaging improvement team came up with a quick reference idea to keep operators on the line and help troubleshoot problems during changeovers.

They developed laminated sheets with illustrations, photos and step-by-step instructions for making adjustments on the various machines. These visual tools are being used in combination with training sessions for each of the machine operators and maintenance workers.

“When you have a machine changeover, you want to make sure that it’s repeatable and you do it the same way every single time,” said John Gerace, packaging team manager at the Gramercy refinery. “These visual instructions will help ensure consistency, reducing adjustments after the changeover because everyone is doing it the same way.”

Visual factory techniques also can be used to help employees sustain efficiency through an orderly workplace, such as marking out the exact placement of tools, arrows on the floor to guide production flow or outlining an area for precise pallet placement.

The Gramercy team’s Lean Visual Factory efforts are an offshoot of a recent seven-week program  that incorporated Six Sigma disciplines to improve the plant’s small packaging operation.