New Volume in Packaging Leads to Many Changes
by Jeff Meiners
The first group of employees to move to the 3rd Shift in Contract Packaging on Sunday, February 28th (they will eventually be joined by about 22 more employees): Cody Matheny, Skyler Foss, Catherine Larson, Jon Larson, Valerie Serrano, Chris Bryant, Becca Dodd, Beckie Talley, April Cover, Ariel Cook, Andrew Wallace, Jim Rhodes, Becky Bearss, Stephanie Kunz, Dustin Crawford, Angie Paul, Stina Kanaras, Vickie Monsarratt, Julie Bergman, Morgan Rains, Rick Hough There is a scene in the original Jaws movie when the folks attempting to catch Jaws get their first look at the beast they have hooked into when Richard Dreyfus turns to the captain and says, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” Well, the contract packaging division has hooked into their own version of Jaws and we too might be in need of a bigger boat! The ending of the movie Jaws didn’t turn out to be that great for the shark or those trying to catch it….our plan is to write a much happier ending for landing the big fish at Crest. Our big fish comes in the form of a project that will occupy three and sometimes four high speed lines in our West Production Facility. In any given 24 hour period of time, this project will require at least four truckloads of pasta to produce over 520,000 cartons of product that will result in seven truckloads of finished product to be shipped to our customer. This is volume that is expected to be consistent year round, so multiply that by five days a week and 52 weeks a year and we’re talking about some serious volume. This truly is business that we have been working for the past forty years to secure. Is there enough volume to warrant building a bigger building? Crest does like to build buildings, but the key to doing this project well will be to do it without increasing our overhead and making some operational changes to make it all possible. The first change we are making is to go to three production shifts for the West facility. We certainly did not make this decision lightly – we have been on two shifts of production with a third shift for master sanitation and pre- ventative maintenance for a very long time. Three shifts of production means we have to approach how we operate in a very different manner. Additionally, it is very difficult to staff for a third shift when the long term need for that shift is uncertain. In this case, a long term commitment comes with our new business and time for preventative maintenance and master sanitation have been built into our production planning. A number of experienced people in areas such as production, quality control and maintenance have transferred to this shift making the startup pro- cess virtually seamless. Our confidence level for the success of a three shift operation for this area is extremely high.
4 Crest Ink April, May & June 2016
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker