Food & Drinks Case Study

Bottle supplier

Problem elimination

leading to improved customer satisfaction and avoidance of major capital expenditure

A global supplier of bottles for the drinks industry

Ultra-low frequency failure of PET blown bottles on customers filling lines (in the range of one in 100,000) were creating filling line downtime and high levels of customer dissatisfaction
Such was the level of customer dissatisfaction that the PET bottle supplier was 100% hand inspecting their supply at a cost of around 20 FTE

Formed a joint project team to carry out detailed, structured analysis of the problem, data capture and structured problem solving
Created a 'failures database' to enable identification of root causes
Structured analysis and problem solving revealed that five independent low-frequency events needed to coincide simultaneously to create the localised weakness known as a "poly-fold."
Once the five independent issues were identified a series of engineering solutions were put in place to eliminate the poly-folds permanently

The problem was eliminated with no capital expenditure
In addition, a capital expenditure for optical quality checking of the bottles was averted saving £50,000 per machine, on 230 machines worldwide, giving a capital expenditure avoidance of £11.5 million.
A detailed problem hierarchy was documented to share the understanding of the root causes with the global team and to avoid recurrence.
A series of problem solving workshops followed this pilot work to transfer this approach to the other client teams