CONSUMER PRODUCT MANUFACTURING

Our Client is a major consumer products company that needed to increase their commercial production rate to meet increasing consumer demand. Given that the demand had to be met in a short time frame, building a new manufacturing plant was out of question. The proprietary production recipe was based on laboratory and plant data that spanned several decades. The manufacturing plant was optimized over time and the Client did not have any immediate optimization opportunities. Annual revenue for this consumer product exceeds $1 billion.

Our team first reviewed laboratory and plant data along with the manufacturing process. Conceptual design techniques were applied to formulate manufacturing process options based on the data. Changes in manufacturing recipe were then tested at the lab scale. Certain changes in the manufacturing recipe resulted in operational difficulties and therefore discarded. Two of the process options were successful in lab testing and resulted in significant simplification of the manufacturing process.

The new manufacturing recipe requires reduced steps thereby enabling greater than 60% increase in production rate with no need for additional manufacturing equipment for this increased production. A major improvement was that the batch cycle time in the chemical transformation section was reduced by half. Due to improved efficiency, specific production cost was reduced by more than 30%. The new manufacturing process was successfully implemented at the commercial production facilities in US and Europe.