In pharmaceuticals and for consumer-packaged goods companies in general, packaging may be the last place in the corporation that has not been Six-Sigma'd to death. Companies have been looking for ways to squeeze time and cost out of the manufacturing process and they've finally arrived at packaging's door.
There's more intense pressure to get packaged products to market faster, to increase quality, and reduce the amount of re-work. There's increasing pressure to reduce internal costs. Re-work is extremely costly! No one can say in meeting, "Jim, are you the guy that caused that 400,000 dollars worth of re-work? Please raise your hand if you are responsible." No one is willing to quantify it because the minute you do, it means it really happened.
Packaging department feels the heat of change
Whether it's for counterfeiting reasons, branding, FDA compliance, to accommodate an ingredients change, or for marketing purposes, package changes have an impact on the packaging department. These people feel pressured by their company to make more changes, make them more quickly, with the same amount of staff or less, and to use less money. And the packaging folks are always at the end of this process, so if the changes are late, it must be their fault. The poor packaging folks always get hit with "well, it was supposed to be on the shelf last week but its still down in packaging."
A lot of packaging department people are now asking, "If that's the way life is, is there something we can do to mitigate that issue?" That is where the Six Sigma process comes into play. And here is how it kind of works—first of all, everyone has a process because product is getting to the shelf. With Six Sigma, you simply look at the current process to determine whether or not there are places where time can be removed. Six Sigma may sound ugly or expensive, but it's actually a good thing for packaging because it forces the analysis of your current practices that exist today in that process ...Read the rest of the article
There's more intense pressure to get packaged products to market faster, to increase quality, and reduce the amount of re-work. There's increasing pressure to reduce internal costs. Re-work is extremely costly! No one can say in meeting, "Jim, are you the guy that caused that 400,000 dollars worth of re-work? Please raise your hand if you are responsible." No one is willing to quantify it because the minute you do, it means it really happened.
Packaging department feels the heat of change
Whether it's for counterfeiting reasons, branding, FDA compliance, to accommodate an ingredients change, or for marketing purposes, package changes have an impact on the packaging department. These people feel pressured by their company to make more changes, make them more quickly, with the same amount of staff or less, and to use less money. And the packaging folks are always at the end of this process, so if the changes are late, it must be their fault. The poor packaging folks always get hit with "well, it was supposed to be on the shelf last week but its still down in packaging."
A lot of packaging department people are now asking, "If that's the way life is, is there something we can do to mitigate that issue?" That is where the Six Sigma process comes into play. And here is how it kind of works—first of all, everyone has a process because product is getting to the shelf. With Six Sigma, you simply look at the current process to determine whether or not there are places where time can be removed. Six Sigma may sound ugly or expensive, but it's actually a good thing for packaging because it forces the analysis of your current practices that exist today in that process ...Read the rest of the article
