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Six Sigma Green Belt Training provides tools to become better, cheaper and faster

About

Puratos is an international group offering a full range of innovative products, raw materials and application expertise to the bakery, patisserie and chocolate sectors. Their headquarters are just outside Brussels (Belgium), where the company was founded in 1919. Almost a century later, their products and services are available in over 100 countries around the world and, in many cases, are produced by their network of local subsidiaries. Above all, they aim to be ‘reliable partners in innovation’ helping their customers around the world to deliver nutritious and tasty food to their local communities.

The company opened a new headquarters and innovation center in Pennsauken, New Jersey, in 2018. Puratos Corporation invested $10 million to create a state-of-the-art, 23,700 square foot facility designed to bring the company’s management, sales, marketing and technical teams closer together in a collaborative environment for its customers and consumers. The centerpiece of this expansion is the unparalleled Innovation Center, which provides Puratos’ customers with access to the very latest industry equipment, expertise and training, as well as in-depth research into international trends.

The Challenge

Puratos Corp aims to be a reliable partner in innovation helping customers deliver nutritious and tasty food to their local communities. Customers tend to be artisans, industrial manufacturers, supermarkets, and food service companies. To support those goals Puratos wanted to go through Six Sigma Greenbelt training and contacted the New Jersey MEP center, a NIST MEP affiliate, for help.
The training was insightful and taught in a way that it could be tailored to any industry that is looking to become better, cheaper, and faster all while improving quality. The training was data driven and gave us tools to create metrics to assist us with tightening our spec.
— Jaimian Davis, Warehouse Manager

MEP's Role

The central idea behind Six Sigma is to measure how many defects are in a process, then systematically determine how to eliminate them, getting as close to "zero defects" as possible. During the course of the training, members of the company’s supervisory, engineering, quality and training departments participated in Six Sigma Green Belt Certification. Using the first three Six Sigma tools (Define, Measure and Analyze), the team worked to identify and understand the root cause of a problem on the company's primary production line. Using the DMAIC tool, the team defined the problem and measured the loss. Implementing the tools from the training, analysis determined the root cause; we were able to isolate the issue and start corrective actions toward improvement. New systems were implemented, and the process was standardized to control the issue so it could not happen again.
Created June 2, 2020, Updated July 22, 2021