Case Studies

Marty A. Slagel, Corporate Staff Quality, Hormel Foods, gave a compelling presentation to the Aberdeen Group's "Manufacturing in the 21st Century" conference, December 2008, in Boston, Massachusetts. Hormel Foods has been a GainSeeker user for several years. You can access the video and view his presentation.

Long-time GainSeeker user and sporting goods giant Titleist needed a formalized system for rating raw materials and supplier performance for its golf ball manufacturing division, Acushnet. The company now tracks supplier quality for the top 80 percent of their purchasing dollars, in addition to tracking production quality data with great results.

Ken Welchman, director of quality, Golf Ball Operations, Acushnet Company (Titleist), gave a compelling presentation at the IQPC Six Sigma Summit in Orlando, Florida, in January 2008. It is a fascinating glimpse at what makes Titleist the #1 Ball in Golf. Titleist is a long-time GainSeeker user.

This article describes how the Six Sigma effort at Micropump and Hertzler Systems’ software solutions have come together to yield outstanding results. Micropump 'Walks the Talk' when it comes to providing data to drive decisions. Micropump, a unit of IDEX Corporation, is a leader in product innovation and also a leader in innovation in Operational Excellence.

A manufacturer of work-enabling devices for the transportation industry collected and analyzed downtime information in new ways using GainSeeker. The company now keeps with up with increased product demand without increasing production capacity (no capital investment) or staffing.

“In a data driven society, automated data collection is a must,” says John Foley, Network Administrator for Engineering Systems, of Pollak-APD (Actuator Products Division) a Stoneridge, Inc company. “The quicker we get information in hand, the better-off we are.” With this idea in mind, Hertzler Systems recently added some major new functionality to GainSeeker® SPC: support for OPC (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control).

Over a six-month period, GainSeeker helped a department of a transmission components supplier reduce the number of work days by two that it needed to keep up with production demands each week. Meanwhile, output increased by 25% as defects and scrap were minimized.

Consolidated Biscuit Company (CBC) has used Control Charts for years, but the culture of process control is now permeating the company like the smell of cookies baking. The cost savings attributed to not giving away unnecessary amounts of product is substantial.

"Of all the plants in the McCormick Flavor Division, our plant is consistently at the top of the list for efficiency of material usage, and by a substantial margin. We trace that directly back to our use of the Hertzler [GainSeeker] software," John Campbell, quality manager, McCormick Flavor Division of McCormick & Company, Inc.

This case study looks at one company’s experience deploying and implementing a set of Six Sigma projects within the context of a robust data systems infrastructure – the establishment of which is a fundamental first step in developing an effective transactional Six Sigma initiative. With such an infrastructure in place, projects can proceed more rapidly and with greater success.