Private Equity seeks help in improving their beauty products manufacturer

The Problem

Like many of our clients the Private Equity owned platform company tried many avenues for self-improvement. Harren Equity who owned the contract filling company sought better operational control, cost reduction and leadership.

The Solution

The Omaha, NE company had 20 plus fill lines and several mixing rooms to produce a wide variety of shampoos, lotions, fragrances and cleaning products for their clients. They employed  a mix of temp labor and full-time FTE’s to be flexible to customer demand. A team of Renaissance consultants conducted an assessment and a senior consultant was appointed to a C-Level position within Marianna. A first order of business was identifying gaps in the companies’ systems. Because they lacked proper tools for visibility the flexibility became a liability leading to labor and resource shortages. A deep diagnostic was conducted on the MRP, strategic changes were implemented to smooth production and increase OTD. Operationally, an Employee Involvement Prototype was conducted on a high-volume fill line in order to answer the basic questions of what are seeing? what don’t we like? and what will we change for better performance tomorrow? The Operations Teams identified SMED issues, training, rate optimizations, resource availability issues and maintenance issues. Those issues were assigned to the responsible groups for completion and those groups presented to the employees on the manufacturing line the “fixes” that would be implemented. This process was rolled out to each fill line and mixing room for optimization. The paradigm shift from management telling employees what to fix and flipping the script and have the employees understand the data, see the gaps and propose solutions provided needed urgency and excitement.
Overall, the 5 M’s were addressed: manpower, methods, machinery, materials and most importantly communication were resolved. The Marianna Operating System was developed and implemented. A sustainable path forward for future continuous improvement was established.
 

The Results

With the RP teams assistance Marianna achieved some outstanding results. The project succeeded in several KPI’s and accomplishments:

• 31.5% in overall bottling throughput improvement

• 17.5% increase in Revenue due to utilization of open capacity

• 16.8% reduction in direct and indirect labor cost and headcount

• 1.5% increase in fluid yield

• Achieved 90.9% overall OTD

• Acquired packaging resources in exchange for favorable contracts to fulfill diverse requirements

Marianna continues to have success today.