Foods to interview. And the rest is history! So working with food or food ingredients has been in Al’s life for quite
some time. After seven years in the Ingredient Division, Al was promoted to a Production Floor Supervisor where he has spent that last 12 years. At Al’s farewell lunch in March, he thanked everyone for all the years he was able to spend with them and re- minded everyone ‘to love your neighbor as yourself ’. Al and his wife plan to spend some time in Arizona and do a little travel. Al, you will be missed! Packaging QA Goes Mobile by Dawn Summers Packaging QA is on the move… literally! With the implementation of Redzone, QA has been working towards the goal of being fully mobile. After many months and a few hurdles, it looks like our efforts will be coming to fruition! It has taken the cooperation of many departments to make this happen through the resourcefulness of many Crest employees. After months of searching for the right tools, it seems we are ready to go live on line! This was not without some challenges. The seemingly most simple of tasks turned out to be complicated. For example, we trialed many dif- ferent mobile carts, none of which fit our exact needs. Our purchasing department thought “outside the box” and worked with our machine shop, to modify carts to fit our unique application…carts done. Next on the list were Blue tooth scales to talk to Redzone, which again with today’s technology seemed like an easy find. It was not. This type of scale, with the software we needed, was not readily available and came with a high price tag. Again using some creativity and ingenuity, QA and purchasing were able to make this a reality with the help of our knowl- edgeable suppliers and Crest resourcefulness. We also have had the help and support of the machine shop and building maintenance to build and install flowmeters throughout the plant. What does going mobile look like you ask? You will see QA Techs on the floor at each line not only doing their regular line checks, they will also be doing weights and leak tests right on the line as samples are pulled to be tested. This will reduce our discovery and action time if a problem is present. Secondly, with the flowmeters being acces- sible on the lines, line operators will be empowered to have more ownership and control over leakers since they can test product at any time if they suspect an issue or to be proactive in preventing one. Maintenance can also test product at start up and after adjustments to make sure they have gotten the desired results from their work.
Our goal is to reduce the amount of product needing to be pulled, in turn reduce rework, loss of material and manpower needed to repair quality issues. This initia- tive will also increase the amount of QA presence and checks on the lines which will allow QA to inform the operators if they are seeing issues with weights or leakers, in the “warning” stage, to ensure we are making adjustments before a fail- ure occurs. With line techs not needing to collect their samples and return to their weigh stations to do testing, which can take an hour, our reaction time to issues is expected to increase and the amount of pulled product is expected to decrease significantly. This has been a long journey and a combined effort of many departments and we are grateful for the support and are excited to see the results of our collaboration.
April, May & June 2019 Crest Ink 7
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