Case Studies

It's incredible to see people make amazing changes which even they didn't think they could achieve John Bath, CEO


INDUSTRY:

Pharmaceutical Packaging (Private Equity)

OBJECTIVE:

  • Increase capacity to match sales growth
  • Create a legacy of continuous improvement

SUPPORT LEVEL:

2 Consultants, 4 months

RESULTS:

The 'Growth Through Excellence' team focused on fulfilling the growing customer demand and high service expectations, in two months they delivered a 35% increase in capacity.


WHY MEDICA AND CHARTWELL JOINED FORCES

Medica called on Chartwell when faced with an urgent need to increase capacity to meet anticipated growth in sales in an accelerated timeframe. Medica has a very capable workforce with a strong quality focus, previous attempts to create a culture of continuous improvement had plateaued. Chartwell's objective was to develop lasting structures, systems and training to drive ongoing improvement, while simultaneously ensuring the program delivered real results.


We wanted to generate a very practical feeling about what "Growth through Excellence" really means- not just words but inherent in the DNA of our organisation John Bath, CEO


Results of the 4 month project

During the project, Growth Through Excellence teams in Cutting and Gluing achieved a 35% increase in capacity, coached by Chartwell. Since then, Medica have continued to deliver improvements for their customers and have invested in the long term strength of the business, for example they have appointed a member of the team to a full time Continuous Improvement role and have launched improvement teams in other parts of the business.


The improvement program gave is the tools and knowledge to implement improvements, which mwe can apply to any future projects. Mark Wilson, Shift manager


Examples of project work

See how problem solving was used to increase Cutting throughput by reducing downtime

PROBLEM:

High waste levels and downtime due to cardboard sheet that 'curls' at the edges.

ACTION:

Problem solving and root cause analysis lead to 100% elimination of "curly board".

Learn more about how we tackled this problem >>

Learn how we increased speed 26% in Folding & Gluing

PROBLEM:

The speed of the Gluing line was bottlenecked by a difficult manual packing process at the end of the line - automating the process would require a capital outlay of £65,000.

ACTION:

Redesign the manual packing process to eliminate time consuming activities, without CAPEX.

Learn more about how we redesigned the carton packing process >>

See an example of continuous improvement in the Cutting team

PROBLEM:

One of the largest causes of downtime over the last 6 months was due to large pieces of scrap from the cutting process blocking the extractor.

ACTION:

The Cutting team continued to work on the problem after Chartwell left site. They successfully iterated a series of design modifications to the extractor entrance to eliminate the problem.

Read more about how the Cutting team tackled this problem >>