A War on Waste!
We see waste everyday and everywhere. We are so used to seeing it, that we don’t recognize it and it doesn’t even seem to faze us at all. That is unless you are Mark Fox. Who is Mark Fox? Well Mark Fox was the Production Manager at a Frito-Lay snack food processing plant where I worked many, many years ago and Mark was especially in-tune to waste. I learned a great deal from him.
Mark was really intense. He was a “no BS” kind of guy. He just always expected perfection and he never settled for less. He applied this high-level of intensity to every aspect of plant operations, down to each nitty-gritty detail. The project that stands out most to me, even to this day, was our War on Waste initiative.
Mark identified a large financial opportunity for our plant. It was in our packaging waste quantity. We were posting a 5% scrap rate on our packaging material. Specifically, snack food bags. This scrap showed up in our packaging variance reports which dropped to the bottom-line of the Income Statement. I know 5% doesn’t sound like a lot and even with the 5% packaging scrap we were still achieving our financial budget. Really, we were having a very successful year at this plant. However, hitting budget or not, to Mark Fox, a 5% scrap rate represented a huge 7-figure financial opportunity.
Hence, our plant’s War on Waste was launched. Since we were operating at a 5% scrap rate, a realistic goal might have been a 50% reduction, down to only a 2.5% scrap rate. But to Mark Fox, a 50% reduction just wasn’t good enough. He wanted our plant to start operating at a 0.5% packaging scrap rate! That’s right, from 5% to 0.5%. This goal wasn’t some whimsical target designed to motivate his leadership staff. This 0.5% target was a very concrete goal driven by a very intense Production Manager.
I was the night shift supervisor on the potato chip line at the time. I remember Mark coming in at 6AM (an hour before my shift ended) and he would dig into every trash cart that was on the production floor and pull-out scrap packaging material. He would lift it up and shake it in front of my face saying, “why is this here!” Then he would move to the next trash cart and do the same thing again. Although his actions and tone were very demoralizing to me after working a long 12-hour shift, he had a point. Why was all of that packaging in the trash can?
You see, Mark was waking me up. My operators and I were not focused on scrap. We were focused only on production. However, it wasn’t just my team that had the waste problem. This complacency was rampant throughout the factory. Nobody tried to reduce waste because nobody thought about it. That is until Mark came along and kicked us in the ass.
After a full week of waste awareness training (aka kicking our ass for trash can waste), we began to tackle this initiative as a formal project. Teamwork became our best approach. Mark was unrelenting and there is strength in numbers. If we wanted to achieve this crazy aggressive goal, we needed a plan. Weekly War-on-Waste meetings and daily huddles became the norm. We even came up with a project slogan; The Drive to Point Five!
Instead of Mark asking all of the questions, as plant leaders, we started asking them ourselves. Questions like these helped us identify detailed action plans:
- Can we change-over from Ruffles to Lays brands with less packaging scrap?
- Can we PM the packaging machines so they perform better?
- How do we train our operators better?
- Can we run the packaging rolls all the way down to the cores instead of leaving material?
- Can we audit our packaging quality, so we make less defects?
- Are our suppliers delivering the correct packaging quantity on each roll of packaging?
- Are there technological advances that we could incorporate to reduce scrap?
Each of these questions led us to create many action items. Each action item had a small impact as to the reduction of scrap, but collectively all of our action items had a significant impact on the scrap rates. Quickly we reduced the scrap by 50%. However, getting down to the goal of 0.5% scrap required an incredible amount of detailed work. Literally every bag mattered. When any of us noticed a bag in the scrap cart, we started asking “why?”. Our attention on waste became as intensely focused as Mark’s. We all agreed that there was no acceptable level of waste, and our senses became acutely aware of this fact.
I was very fortunate to have had such an intensely focused Production Manager in my first leadership role. Mark taught me three important manufacturing lessons: 1) Set aggressive goals, 2) Don’t be complacent and 3) Details matter. Although I never reached Mark’s level of intensity, I did apply his manufacturing principles in my own way and in doing so, I achieved many unbelievable results. So here is a shoutout to Mark! Thanks Mark (wherever you are)!
You see, I’m not sure what happened to Mark Fox. Our paths parted many years ago. I know he stayed in operations, but he went to work for another company in another state. He was a great leader so I’m sure he was successful in everything he did.
Our War on Waste was successful! We dropped our packaging waste from 5% to 0.5% and thus our “Drive to Point Five” was accomplished. I’m proud of this result and I’m proud of the team that accomplished it. Sometimes it takes an intensely focused leader to “kick the beehive” and wake people up. Complacency is the enemy of results. Look in your trash cans and open your eyes to a better way and a better day.
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