By Thinking Outside the Box, Tyoga Container Company Greatly Increases Efficiency

For over 50 years, Tyoga Container Company, a family-owned manufacturer located in Tioga, Pennsylvania, has met customers’ most challenging needs as they plan, pack, protect and ship goods. Tyoga Container specializes in providing corrugated box, bulk bag, transit protection and pallet and crate solutions.

Tyoga Container’s fully integrated corrugated box services include multicolor direct printing and lithographic printed corrugated packaging, regular slotted cartons, rotary and flatbed die cutting, specialty gluing, large and bulk packaging and inner packaging. With its bulk bags Tyoga serves a variety of industries like food, pharmaceutical, healthcare, farming and construction. Tyoga’s pallets and crates give customers the option to customize just about anything they might need to handle, store or transport.

Tyoga Container Company’s leadership team desired to better utilize employee skills in the bulk bag process. Management wanted to first streamline the process and then determine the best place to house those responsibilities within the process.

NEPIRC, part of the Pennsylvania MEP and the MEP National Network™, recommended a value stream mapping (VSM) event so that Tyoga Container management could better understand the current state of the process, envision an ideal state and create an action plan to streamline the process and determine where specific responsibilities should be transferred.

Prior to the three-day VSM event, a NEPIRC facilitator created an event charter, which detailed the event’s scope, mission, goals, metrics and team members. On the first day of the VSM, the Tyoga Container team received classroom-style training on current state mapping techniques and observed the selected process at a high-level while collecting data like process time, accuracy, distance, motion and queues of information. Using paper and pencil, the team created a current state map of the process.

On day two, the Tyoga Container team received classroom-style training again but this time it was for future state mapping so that they could create an ideal state map of the process. Team members participated in a guided improvement brainstorming session and then prioritized their ideas based on selected criteria.

On day three, the team created an implementation plan and assigned responsibilities and target completion dates within a three-month period. The team also created a future state map of the process to show changes to the process based on the planned improvements and detailed individual action items. At the end of the day, the team reported their plan to Tyoga Container management. Then, over the next 12-16 weeks, NEPIRC and Tyoga Container’s VSM team worked to implement the action plan and attended bi-weekly status update meetings.