Lean Business Specialists - Nestadt Consulting

Amcor Cartonboard

What was the Challenge?
What was the Solution?
What were the Results?

What was the Challenge?
Amcor s cartonboard plant at Petrie, near Brisbane, is the only Australian manufacturer of carton-board for folding cartons. Folding cartons are used for breakfast cereals, biscuits, personal health products and numerous other grocery lines.

At the heart of a plant is a single, very large paper-making machine that produces 42 different grades of paper. The machine operates most efficiently when run in long campaigns where it moves from one grade to another in predetermined order, without interruption or out-of-sequence production.

Production was organised around a 14 day customer service cycle during which each grade was produced and made available to the customer.

Customers, however, were demanding ever shorter lead times. An increasing number of urgent orders were creating numerous operational difficulties, with out-of-sequence machine changeovers hampering efficiency and throughput.

Other problems included a very high variation in the level of demand and an inability to effectively deal with peaks due to the limited capacity of the paper machine.

All of this led to a considerable amount of stress being placed on the business and so Amcor Petrie engaged Nestadt Consulting to help them achieve new performance objectives. The company wanted to:

significantly reduce lead times

maintain 100% order promise integrity

smooth demand on the paper machine to increase capacity and quality

better manage demand variability

minimise complexity in the planning process.

What was the Solution?
A team consisting of key personnel in Amcor s planning department, along with consultants from Nestadt Consulting, worked together analyse the causes of demand variability and evaluate various planning and inventory management options.

What were the Results?
Amcor Petrie achieved all of its new performance objectives, including:

a 50% reduction in lead time for core products, which represented two thirds of customer needs

retention of 100% order promise integrity

a simpler ordering system with weekly supply of top products supplied within 7 days to the Eastern Seaboard

significantly smoother operation of the paper machine, which had the flow-on effect of increasing the overall capacity of the plant (by x%?)

the capability for customers to significantly reduce their own inventory levels given the quicker response time from the Petrie plant.