A leading global player in the packaging industry was facing significant challenges due to recurring problems across its 22 locations. These recurring problems were impacting sales, supplier relationships, and internal operations, leading to substantial financial losses and decreased customer satisfaction.
Challenges
Sales: Recurring problems were putting customer relationships at risk, particularly with key clients like Heineken. There was no consistent system for tracking and managing customer complaints across different sites.
Suppliers: Difficulty in proving supplier responsibility for recurring issues was leading to missed chargebacks. Lack of visibility into supplier performance made it challenging to identify trends and compare suppliers effectively.
Internal Plants: The absence of a centralized problem solving system resulted in the same problems being solved repeatedly at different plants. Inconsistent investigation quality across plants created further inefficiencies.
The estimated cost of these inefficiencies was significant. For example, re-solving problems that had already been addressed elsewhere cost the company an estimated $1.5 million across Europe alone.
Solution: The packaging company implemented PHRED, a web-based problem-solving software, to address these challenges. PHRED provided a centralized platform to manage problems from customer complaints to supplier issues and internal plant concerns.
Sales: PHRED instilled confidence in knowing what was happening across the company, including which sites were experiencing problems with specific customers. The standardized 8D system ensured consistent, high-quality reporting to customers, bolstering their confidence.
Suppliers: PHRED provided the data necessary to support supplier chargebacks. The system enabled real-time visibility into supplier performance, allowing identification of trends and comparison of suppliers.
Internal Plants: PHRED provided visibility across all sites, enabling the identification and prevention of recurring problems. The centralized platform:
Facilitated collaboration, driving actions, and sharing information effectively
Provided an easy way to generate reports and manage actions, streamlining internal processes
Improved the quality of root cause analysis, ensuring that solutions were more effective and sustainable
Overall, PHRED enabled the global packaging company to save money by eliminating recurring problems, improving customer satisfaction through consistent and timely responses, and enhancing supplier accountability through better tracking and communication. The company estimated that the ROI from PHRED immediately exceeded the system's cost due to time savings across 22 locations and hundreds of users.
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