See how a global snack giant revolutionized quality with Glassdome
OVERVIEW
Our client is Orion Corporation, a $2.3b confectionary and creator of the much-imitated, never-improved-upon Choco Pie dessert and snack cake.
CHALLENGES
Orion faced a changing market that demanded new, diverse products. In response, the company expanded their product line from five products to over fifty.
That increased the number of items under management (raw materials, equipment, machines, etc.) from 295 to 630. That overwhelmed their existing quality control processes, and customer quality complaints tripled.
The existing quality control process dated from 1997. It involved manual measurement of the treats using calipers and rulers, handwritten reporting, and manual data entry into a desktop computer.
The root causes of its quality challenges were boiled down to three root causes:
- No system to monitor production across facilities and react to abnormal events
- Legacy software and processes that tied up a worker each shift and resulted in long, slow feedback loops
- Siloed data between teams and facilities led to mistakes being repeated across departments.
Very little data was entering the system, and what data was entered was barely analyzed or reported on. Something needed to change.
SOLUTIONS
Orion brought in Glassdome for a pilot program at a factory in South Korea with seven lines and 600 employees.
We installed our real-data, real-time CI solution across the factory.
We deployed an automated data flow with sensors at each key point in the production process, including mixing, forming, baking, shaping, and enrobing. We can measure everything from oven humidity, to cake thickness, to chocolate temperature.
Our real-time production monitoring and automated data collection across all seven lines gives managers single-pane-of-glass visibility. Our central data storage means the entire plant can access the same data and communicate with each other in the platform. That data can be analyzed and reported on by anyone with access.
Our system immediately discovered abnormalities that on-site staff could fix. A leaking oven cover was welded shut and poorly installed heating pipes were rejoined.
Over the medium term, real-time data and a single pane of visibility allowed for:
- Immediate response to downtime and other issues
- Automatic measurement securing data reliability
- Holistic analysis through easy data sharing
- Correlation analysis measurement of degree of influence
RESULTS
Our automated data pipeline and integrated control points dramatically improved quality and consistency.
Choco Pie size and thickness were brought almost entirely within tolerance.
All three of the client’s key KPIs were improved.
Quality was up 10%, as measured by their internal Process Capability Index score
Production yield increased
Customer complaints fell
Plus, the company was able to redeploy staff from manual quality control to production lines that desperately needed more manpower.
As a result of the successful implementation, Orion is rolling Glassdome out at plants around the world.
“Glassdome’s software helped us solve a problem that would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of defects. We were able to view this problem remotely in Vietnam and act in real time in Korea, which was mindblowing!”
Project Manager, Orion