Cook Polymer Technology fixes supply delay issues
The people who work in production at Cook are very familiar with our production ecosystem. Much like natural ecosystems, when everything is in the proper balance, the system works in harmony. When materials and manpower align, devices flow effortlessly out of Cook facilities and on to our customers. But if one area is experiencing a lack of materials or manpower, it throws off all of the departments down the line and can lead to that most dreaded of all phrases—“backorders.”
Earlier this year, Cook Polymer Technology (CPT) found itself in the unfortunate position of being late on deliveries. As Cook Medical’s largest supplier of raw materials, CPT’s ability to deliver products on time has a significant impact to the organization.
Close relationship with suppliers
One of Bill Cook’s guiding philosophies was that if you wanted to ensure your raw materials were of the highest quality, you had to make them yourself. It is the reason Mr. Cook decided to establish Sabin Corporation (now called CPT) in 1969 to produce custom plastic tubing and other molded parts for all the Cook device manufacturing facilities.
A combination of factors over the last few years had caused CPT to fall behind on its orders. By the end of 2016, 80 different raw materials were not being produced and shipped on time.
“Eighty is a high number of late raw materials from any of our vendors,” said Amy Opheim, part of the supplier account lead team in Purchasing at Park 48. This team works with vendors to make sure the raw material pipeline remains open. “We are always monitoring this the flow of materials from our vendors. When we see that our vendors are having trouble getting materials in on time, we want to see if there is something we can fix or at least identify the problem—and maybe even prevent it. Particularly with CPT, who is a sister company.”
The supplier account lead team will work with many different groups—Engineering and Quality Engineering, Incoming QC, and Manufacturing, for example—to get as complete a picture as possible of the situation.
In this case, Amy also reached out to the CPT team. Operations had already been working to figure out where they had fallen behind.
Identifying the bottle neck
“We were behind in our extrusion department. In many ways, that’s our beginning. It is imperative for us to ensure the health of the beginning of our supply chain,” said Nate Myers, general manager of CPT.
Extrusion is where, not surprisingly, tubing is extruded—meaning that plastic is melted and then formed into tubing of a pre-determined size and shape to meet the customer specifications. Sometimes that tubing is sent straight to the “customer,” which is Cook manufacturing; other times it is sent to downstream CPT departments to be used in the manufacture of components. Regardless of its final destination, and aside from CPT’s material compounding, extrusion is the first step for many devices in the Cook catalog.
Finding ways to be efficient
One of the main culprits causing the delays in extrusion was downtime. So, Operations and the continuous improvement team held a rapid improvement event to identify and eliminate waste from processes. The group implemented organizational techniques and put solutions in place to reduce the “changeover” time between production runs. The results were pretty dramatic. Changing over the extrusion machines, a process that used to take four hours, was cut down to one hour and 40 minutes. A second rapid improvement event was held to address disassembly, re-assembly, and cleaning of the product line and tooling, which led to another 30 minutes being cut off the process.
I am proud of what the entire CPT team has accomplished. From embracing changes to working long hours, everyone has pitched in to make a difference.
—Nate Myers
On the Cook Inc. side, Amy’s team determined that if they tweaked their ordering processes to better fit with CPT’s production processes, it would mean fewer disruptions in CPT’s workflow.
Those changes, combined with a lot of hard work by the entire CPT team over the course of the year, saw the number of CPT’s raw material backorders drop from 80 at the beginning of the year to only two by the end of August.
Nate said, “I am proud of what the entire CPT team has accomplished. From embracing changes to working long hours, everyone has pitched in to make a difference. Customer service is our number-one priority at CPT. With the work we have done, I think we have come a long way in accomplishing our goals, all the while still striving to improve.”
Speaking the same language
“Before, it was almost like we were speaking two different languages,” Amy said. “We really worked to open up a dialogue and become more integrated. If they [CPT] have a machine that breaks down, for example, they are going to want to notify me as soon as possible so we can figure out how to handle things on our end. Or if we are upping production in an area, which means an increase in the amount of raw materials we need, we need to let CPT know.”
Nate agreed and said, “I think cross-company communication can be challenging. We really want to focus on our ability to serve and engage our customers. With the new way of thinking of account leads, this helps us be on the same page throughout the entire range of vendor/customer interactions. We all have the same goal—getting products to patients. It’s just a matter of how well we are working with each other to reach that goal.”
Awesome!
What a fantastic example of our new cross company communications and how we can apply marginal gains to give us an impactful result. Great team work!
Great example of the teamwork we are trying to empower all parties with. Keeping those lines of communication open all to come to a common goal. Job well done and congratulations to the entire team for the improvement.
Great job. It is great when a solution is found to any problem ,but it’s even better when you can share the joy. Thanks for sharing.
Awesome success story. Very nice job to see the involvement of so many “Hands-On” employees making a difference with this improvement!
Great teamwork!
THANK YOU CPT Team for sharing your successes. It is very encouraging to read how the whole team took the initiative to conquer these challenges.
Being a part of the team that interfaces with our Clinicians and Supply Chain we feel the direct impact from backorders. It is refreshing to hear how you put in measures to reduce down time and improve efficiencies. What you are doing makes such a HUGE difference to the patients we serve. THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
Very impressive! Outstanding application of identifying the constraint (bottleneck), elevating it and applying improvement tools to the constraint. In this case, you correctly brought your efforts to bear on changeovers. That is absolutely fantastic and a model for the rest of us in Cook to drive throughput and customer satisfaction. Very well done!!!
Joe Ely, Cook Biotech
Thank you all not only for the work and progresses but also for letting us know. There are so many things which are part of our products and influence our business so much and normally you wouldn’t think of it!
Very encouraging to see improvements being made in the extrusion process as well as how lines of communication between sites are opening up. Communication as we all know can be difficult at times within the same company. Great job CPT teams!!! Go Cook!!!
This is wonderful. A great example of cross-functional teamwork!!!!! This may be being done, but scheduling a regular meeting with the various engineering groups and production areas to identify projects that will be consuming materials and human resources would be extremely helpful to the flow of materials and departments. The impact of validations, updating or changing tooling or moving a department are some of things that are often planned well in advance and can be shared with other departments. As project plans are developed, sharing the resource requirements with purchasing, CPT, (and all affected production areas) as soon as the information is available can prevent disruption of schedules, delays in projects or worse, going into back order because of unexpected use of materials. Ideally, the requirements would be presented a quarter before the need, but at the very least the prior month to ensure all parties are on board.
We don’t often have insight into CPT and the very important aspect of raw material extrusion. Being out in the field, end-user customer and distributor facing,we often have to deal directly with the aftermath of the effect of backorders. So, It’s very encouraging to hear about these fantastic efforts to reduce these and the huge difference you’ve made. THANKYOU to you all!
This is a great example of where improved communication improves response times and improves efficiencies. Hopefully this is just the beginning. Maybe some day we will share more documentation in common such as common lot numbers avoiding the need to do translations. Keep going! A more efficient Cook is a more profitable Cook which provides job security for us all. Good Job! to all involved.
Thanks to the CPT teams and the Supplier Management team at Cook Inc, represented in this article by Nate and Amy, for making such good improvements in extrusion and how CPT and Cook Inc work together on bottlenecks. We now have stability for materials and components coming from CPT which provides greater stability for Cook Inc (and other) manufacturing to build products to help patients. Great progress!