Case Study
Division of a $6B Swiss Chemical Producer Delivers 31% Throughput Gain Through Behavioral and Systemic Operating Improvements
31%
Gain in Overall Plant Throughput/Capacity
Strategic Imperative
To deliver throughput and capacity gains in excess of 25% at the newly acquired U.S. plant by improving the overall utilization of plant assets, resources and human capital to gain much-needed production capacity
Client Background
- Global billion-dollar specialty chemical division within a Swiss producer, with 3,000 employees across five continents
- Business held leadership positions in four segments serving customers across specialty chemical applications
- Newly acquired U.S. plant supplied base product for other plants and needed to optimize available capacity
- Industry demand was growing, and the company was actively making capital investments to add production capacity
- Supply chain issues affected customer satisfaction and inventory levels, increasing pressure on plant-level execution reliability
- Plant was the company’s lowest-performing site, creating urgency to improve asset utilization, throughput, and customer satisfaction
Key Issues & Barriers
- Historic plant culture had become a barrier to higher performance and team-based operating discipline
- Weak front-line supervision allowed basic operating issues to escalate instead of being resolved at source
- Core processes and management systems were inadequate across manufacturing, quality control, and maintenance
- Management behaviors were siloed and reactive, favoring firefighting over root-cause problem solving
- Performance information was not accurate or timely enough to guide daily operating decisions
- Reactive maintenance, inconsistent planning, and weak scheduling control drove excessive downtime and constrained plant capacity
Key Implementation Components
- Translated corporate goals into organizational expectations and accountability requirements across plant operating levels
- Developed position-specific expert models with clear roles and responsibilities for manufacturing, quality, and maintenance leadership
- Designed and implemented a System for Managing across manufacturing, quality control, and maintenance
- Created capacity balancing and scheduling methods to improve throughput attainment and reduce lost process time
- Implemented operator control logs and daily operations meetings around process metrics, throughput variance, and planned maintenance
- Established supervisory effectiveness coaching and continuous improvement routines to reinforce new behaviors and root-cause problem solving
Benefits & Results
31%
Gain in Overall Plant Throughput/Capacity
35%
Reduction in Overall Downtime
12%
Reduction in Variable Costs
43%
Reduction in Customer Complaints