Gold'n Plump Poultry provides chicken products to stores, delicatessens, and restaurants in 40 states. Commitment to process excellence has helped the company thrive even in tough times, and Minitab Statistical Software has provided the powerful tools they needed to analyze quality data. But the company's many improvement projects were being performed at multiple locations, using a variety of tools. That made it hard for management to assess the total benefit of their efforts. Now, using Quality Companion software, Gold'n Plump teams rely on one application to manage projects from start to finish.
The challenge
Based in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Gold'n Plump has become the upper Midwest's largest fully integrated broiler chicken producer. This family-owned business also seeks to become the benchmark of manufacturing excellence for the poultry industry. To meet that goal, Gold'n Plump integrates two quality improvement strategies: Six Sigma to address process quality, eliminate defects, and reduce product variation; and lean to boost process speed and flow and eliminate waste. Gold'n Plump's commitment yields real dividends—in 2009, it achieved $5.2 million in companywide savings from improvement projects.
Getting a comprehensive understanding of the impact of all these projects was their challenge. "Projects were making a difference across the company, at all of our facilities, but there was no easy way to share all of the information," says Dean Kirkeby, continuous improvement manager. "There were a lot of questions, information was missing, and there was a lack of consistency across projects. It was a challenge for managers to provide feedback to teams, and to demonstrate their successes to our executives."
How Quality Companion helped
Minitab designed Quality Companion to solve such problems by providing all the tools needed to manage improvement projects in one application. Companion's Project Roadmap helps teams create a detailed plan for an entire project, while built-in "soft" tools, such as process mapping, brainstorming, and reporting, provide the means to complete each step.
Kirkeby discovered Quality Companion when he was searching for a tool to do value-stream mapping (VSM), a primary technique in lean initiatives. Companion's VSM tool makes it easy to track key variables such as inventory, takt time, and cycle time. "It's very powerful, but has almost no learning curve," Kirkeby says. "It's extremely easy to use."
That was just the beginning. As he began using many of Companion's more than 100 built-in forms, including C&E Matrix, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and Project Charter, Kirkeby saw how the software saves time by centralizing project data and eliminating needless re-entry. "Quality Companion uses the data you enter in one tool throughout the project," Kirkeby says. "For instance, you can brainstorm in the fishbone tool, then share the information you've created with the next phase of the project."
The company also needed a way to better capture and demonstrate the overall impact of its quality efforts. The Quality Companion Dashboard utility, which aggregates and displays details of all Quality Companion projects for a company, provided the solution.
"When my boss realized how easy it would be to view the status of our CQI efforts with the Dashboard, he quickly went from a skeptic to a believer," Kirkeby says. "The Dashboard really proved itself to our executives. We even use information we gather from the Dashboard to demonstrate results to bankers and financiers."
Results
A year after Gold'n Plump began using Quality Companion to manage improvement projects, the benefits are clear. Project quality has improved, and teams complete their projects more quickly. "Quality Companion helps us finish projects more efficiently," Kirkeby says. "And if someone wants more details, it's all right there in your project file. It gives you great confidence when you're presenting your results."
Quality Companion's built-in coaches, which give expert advice from experienced lean Six Sigma professionals, also have been helpful. "The coaches are great for Green Belts who are still learning, because they can find most of the answers they need right in the software."
But it may be the Dashboard's powerful project tracking and reporting capabilities that have provided the biggest benefits. "We used to track projects on a spreadsheet," Kirkeby notes. "Gathering information about each project, entering it, then creating reports took 20 percent to 40 percent of our time. Now, because the project information and data is already stored in Companion, we don't spend time doing nonvalue-added tasks. That frees us to focus on the projects themselves.
"Quality Companion furthers our CQI efforts," Kirkeby says. "And that helps Gold'n Plump meet our ultimate goal: supporting and delighting our customers."
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