William McGee, packaging team manager at the Port Wentworth plant, inspects work on the updating of the brown sugar packaging line to improve production yields.

Packaging Team Manager William McGhee receives a “statement of yield” every month, which tells him how much sugar the Port Wentworth refinery has produced and how much it should have produced – based on the raw sugar the refinery started with.

“You want the yield to be high,” says McGhee. The refinery always loses a very small amount during the production process, but McGhee’s aim is to package and make available for selling 99 percent of the original volume of raw sugar.

He suspected that two of the bagging machines – called FAWEMA #9 and FAWEMA #10, named after the manufacturer – were “giving away” sugar with each package and decreasing the yield. So, he had a DMAIC team do an analysis, starting with the FAWEMA #9 machine that typically packages 10-pound bags of extra-fine granulated sugar.

DMAIC – which stands for define, measure, analyze, improve and control – is a Six Sigma approach used to determine root causes of problems in manufacturing or other processes. In this instance, the team randomly pulled 100 bags off the line, weighed them and did some number-crunching.

What the team learned is that the average “giveaway” – or the average amount of extra sugar going into bags – was 45.2 grams per bag. That’s a giveaway of approximately 1 percent. “We saw an opportunity for improvement there,” says McGhee.

Overfilling packages decreases total plant yield.

“If I produce five million pounds of sugar, I want 100 percent of that sugar to be sold at the maximum selling price. Overfilling bags means giving away product, which decreases our yield. ”

The DMAIC approach is particularly useful in a case like this because the analysis helps a business see what could be affecting yield. In measuring and taking stock of the process, says McGhee, “you’re trying to find out if you’re running your process in control, whether you’re staying close to what that target weight is.”

The team quickly did a DMAIC analysis to determine where on the FAWEMA #9 machine the company was losing time or incurring waste. Team members included Willie Jenkins, Willie Johnson, both FAWEMA operators; electrician Michael Anderson; mechanic Rodney Crutfield; and supervisor Tyrone Pinckney.

“Typically, what’s most hurtful to your process is lost time,” says McGhee. “Because if you’re not producing, you’re not making money.”

One of the big learnings can be seen in a Pareto chart that shows how much downtime FAWEMA #9 experienced. “We found that the biggest cause of downtime was operator breaks. So, we found a way to have someone else relieve those workers, and we immediately gained over an hour every day that we were losing to breaks,” McGhee points out.

The team also learned the equipment wasn’t running at the design rate. Every piece of equipment comes with an optimal running speed, which is based on the capability of all the parts. When FAWEMA installed the equipment, the company provided a design rate for it.

What happens over time, though, is that often when operators have minor problems on the line, they slow down the rate slightly – giving the equipment longer to a complete a cycle. Those minor adjustments add up, however.

By increasing the rate to bring it closer to its design rate, FAWEMA #9 went from packaging 10-pound bags of extra-fine granulated sugar at a rate of 40 bags per minute to 50 bags per minute.

“We gave ourselves the opportunity to produce 600 more bags every hour of the 10-pound bags,” McGhee says. “We built more capability into our hourly production rate just by increasing the speed.”

And while DMAIC teams typically do a fresh analysis with each piece of equipment or process, some of the learnings from the FAWEMA analysis – such as the new approach to operators taking breaks – will translate to the FAWEMA #10 machine, as well as to the packaging process for different sized packages.

Sugar cane growing in southern Louisiana

The growth of sugar cane and commercial sugar production has been an important industry in Louisiana for more than 200 years. Louisiana State University is preserving the vital history of the sugar industry in the state through an extensive and information-rich online resource.

The extensive holdings of LSU together with the LSU Rural Life Museum, the Audubon Sugar Institute, the LSU Agricultural Center and generous individuals, offer a chronological panorama of the artifacts and techniques of sugar production in Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Click here to access LSU’s site.

According to Bloomberg, production may climb to 8 million metric tons in the crop year starting Nov. 1, 2010, said Prasert Tapaneeyangkul, the secretary-general, in an interview in Bangkok. That compares with 7.64 million tons forecast for the 2009-10 season and 7.19 million tons this year, he said.

Sugar has more than doubled this year as production lagged behind demand in India and lower-than-expected output in Brazil, the top producer, worsened a global deficit. The surge in prices has encouraged farmers in Thailand to boost plantings, and the nation may harvest a record 75 million tons of cane in the 2010- 11 season, Prasert said.

Read the full story.

Speaking with employees, community leaders and media at its reopened Port Wentworth refinery in Georgia, Chief Executive Officer and President John Sheptor said recently: “Our competitors told our customers that we did not have the will to rebuild or the fortitude to continue. Looking around us, it is obvious that they were wrong.”

Imperial Sugar’s chief executive added: “Dixie Crystals brand is stronger than ever and better prepared to compete than ever before. We did not let our loyal customers down nor did we ever consider it.”

“We end today Port Wentworth’s absence from industrial channel sales, the silence from our crippled refinery, empty truck gates and empty rail tracks, refinery operations insurance claims and zeros on our production ledgers,” Sheptor said.

He praised the leadership of Brian Harrison, vice president of technology in charge of the rebuild, and senior project manager Dwayne Zeigler – along with hundreds of employees and contractors – for building “one of the most modern and safest sugar refineries in the world.”

Only eight days into his job as chief executive, Sheptor was touring the refinery when the explosion occurred. Dealing with the disaster and its aftermath, Sheptor’s responsiveness, openness and compassion became his trademarks, earning him respect from employees and their families, as well as civic and community leaders.

“We are the new sugar factory in Port Wentworth, Georgia, and we stand strong together to face an unknown future with impassioned solidarity born through tragedy,” Sheptor said. “I am proud to be a member of this employee family and I rejoice with your success today.”