Cam Thieu Company successfully applied LEAN in production

Established in 2017, Cam Thieu Company is known as a manufacturer specializing in tea, wine and jam production from clean raw materials according to VietGAP standards.

Responding to the National Program on “Improving productivity and quality of products and goods of Vietnamese enterprises to 2020” of the Government by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the General Department of Standards, Metrology and Quality (TCDC implementation, Cam Thieu Company cooperated with Technical Center, Quality Measurement 3 (QUATEST 3) as a consulting unit to support to learn and practice applying Lean.

After the survey process, many bottlenecks in the production and management process have been discovered such as: The arrangement, layout of the working space, the layout of the production site are not reasonable; The arrangement of product creation stages is also not flexible, leading to many deadlines as well as causing congestion in the product manufacturing process. There are 3 main groups of problems that the Company is currently facing that have been pointed out by the consultants, including:

– Working space: Currently, the working space at the Company is not arranged in any order. Working positions, tools, tools and materials have not been classified, left clutter on the floor. Items that are not for work, unnecessary tools such as household items also appear in the factory, wasting existing usable space. The environment around the production area and warehouse is not clean, making it difficult to control food hygiene and safety.

– Unreasonable layout: In order to ensure the needs arising in the production process, the Company has repeatedly extended the factory premises, leading to the arrangement of stages has not been properly calculated to ensure optimal during the move. From there, leading to a lot of waste, especially the waste of the transition. Besides, the factory’s newly opened area is very small, causing many difficulties in the rearrangement of the stages according to the flow of the product.

– The production stages are not properly arranged: The arrangement of the production stages (especially for the production of Tra Soursop Pure Flavor Package 100g) arranged mainly based on the experience of the manager , not on a reasonable quantitative basis.

To overcome the above shortcomings, QUATEST 3’s experts have guided the Company to apply 5S implementation and visual management. The packing areas, the arrangement of raw materials, finished goods, and the area for workers to process raw materials have been arranged and rearranged in a reasonable manner. For the current premises, the company management experts have researched the product flow, analyzed and redesigned the production site to completely cut down the waste of the moving process. At the same time, separate product lines, minimize the risk of food cross-contamination, ensure safety and hygiene. Regarding the layout of production stages, the company chose to apply the tool coordination by line and standardize the work. This improvement has contributed to reducing production costs from VND 520,000 / 200 kg (2018) to VND 489,000 / 200 kg (2019).

In addition to major improvements, the Company also implemented a number of small improvements at the same time, such as: re-arranging the entrance to the warehouse for semi-finished products; Increase the capacity of the custard-apple washing process; Equipping a backup drying room for drying leaves; Equipped with machines to increase the slicing capacity by 5 times compared to the previous one: Equipping the machine to increase the capacity of the fiber-iron stage has doubled the capacity of the previous year.

Productivity and Quality Office