HVTDC's Lean 101 Program Helps Balchem Corporation
Improve Production of International Products
“The result is that three of the eight products we wanted to improve now have an increased throughput of 30 to 40% faster. This is a very significant increase in production efficiency.“
Christopher Klosen
Plant Manager
In early 2004, Balchem Corporation in New Hampton, New York, made arrangements for their supervisory team to go through Lean 101 training. “The leadership team," stated Christopher Klosen, Balchem Plant Manager, “picked up a lot of good ideas and started to make improvements right away, because we had a very good team in place.” Based on their initial success with Lean, Balchem chose to put their entire staff of operations personnel through the Lean Training. To do that, they contacted HVTDC, because Balchem’s Vice President of Human Resources, Bob Miniger, had worked with the business resource center over the last several years.
Following the plant-wide Lean training, Balchem began their Lean Team project by selecting their Team members and conducting Value Stream Mapping. They implemented improvements over a 12 week period, beginning in late summer of 2005. “We selected a cross functional group of people,” stated Klosen, “from every discipline in the plant: production operators, maintenance, quality control, shipping and receiving, production scheduling, plus a customer service representative who works in the corporate office. HVTDC’s Field Engineer, Phil Van Oss, had stated it was important to have someone from outside the process to ask obvious questions from an outsider’s perspective -- someone who is not familiar with the production process.”
“Our overall objective,” stated Van Oss, “was for HVTDC to give them training in how to work together as a team, to assist them through the Value Stream Mapping process to identify where improvements could be made, and then to prioritize the most effective improvement activities. We met with the team during the 12-week period to mentor them through implementing some of the key improvements they had identified that they wanted to make in their production lines. We were there to help them focus on what needed to be done to improve their operations and to solve problems. Most of the time the team was actively designing and implementing improvements, and we were there to offer guidance wherever necessary.”
Balchem provides state of the art solutions and quality products for a range of industries around the world. The company consists primarily of three business segments serving the nutritional and product needs of humans and animals: Encapsulated/Nutritional Products, ARC Specialty Products, and BCP Ingredients, Inc.
Van Oss began the process during the first two days by providing exercises in Value Stream Mapping, and assisted the team in the development of a Future State Map to create a plan to develop and improve operational activities. “The goal is to improve on the way things are done today and determine how it could be done better in the future based on the improvement activities that the team identifies. In this exercise, the Team decided on a goal of 15% productivity improvement on their top eight products.”
Klosen stated, “Through the Value Stream Mapping process, we saw the most significant improvement opportunity in the area of modifying our screening equipment. We brought in a technical rep from the supplier, who helped our team identify the problem. The rep helped our staff figure out how to keep the equipment efficiently tuned, and trained our maintenance group on how to get product through faster. The result is that three of the eight products we wanted to improve now have an increased throughput of 30 to 40% faster. This is a very significant increase in production efficiency.“
When the project ended in October 2005, VanOss stated, “It all went very well. They were a very good company to work with and their team required very little support because they did a lot on their own and were quite motivated. They acted on the things that the team suggested, which is a big part of the reason they were successful.”
Chris Klosen summarized the valuable success of the Value Stream Mapping process by stating, “While we didn’t reach our initial goal of improving all of the eight products, we did make very large improvements to three out of eight, which makes a sizable contribution to the overall efficiency of the plant.”
For additional information, call 845-896-6934.