ConAgra

ConAgra

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ConAgra pudding hits sweet spot thanks to WinSPC


Background

ConAgra Foods, Inc. [NYSE: CAG], is North America’s second-largest food company with $27 billion in annual sales. ConAgra supplies restaurants, foodservice customers and branded food products for grocery stores. The ConAgra Grocery Products Division packages Hunt Wesson Snack Pack Pudding. The Grocery Products Division has gained significant benefits using WinSPC.

“It’s critical to know each pudding cup’s weight and how it’s trending to prevent a runaway problem. WinSPC pays for itself by eliminating just one of these types of problems.”

Todd Kaiser
Quality Manager
ConAgra Grocery Products Company


Challenge

ConAgra Grocery Products Division makes and packages multiple flavors and styles of pudding. In order to ensure high quality and consistency, ConAgra needed to tightly control several processes such as flavor, color, viscosity, pH and unit weight.
ConAgra especially wanted to improve control over individual cup weights. Since ConAgra produces several million pudding cups per year, light weight inaccuracies over time can be prohibitively costly. Underfilled cups are scrapped and over-filled units give away product.

In addition to the identification of cup weight problems, any shutdown of a line for corrective action also adds several hours of down time for mandatory cleaning and sterilization before the line can be restarted. ConAgra, therefore, wanted to prevent cup weight problems and pinpoint their root cause so they could reduce costly downtime.

Implementation

ConAgra chose WinSPC for the following reasons:

  • WinSPC automatically accepts real-time data through a variety of input devices
  • WinSPC enables the manipulation and correlation of data to produce key decision-making reports
  • WinSPC has a customizable operator interface that can be easily modified to support corporate initiatives
  • WinSPC solution delivery has been instrumental in our success

Results

WinSPC helps ConAgra maintain consistent unit weight, therefore, greatly reducing costly product overfills, scrap and downtime. By closely monitoring the filling process through WinSPC, ConAgra also was able to revise machine maintenance schedules to support optimum performance.

Benefits

ConAgra specifically cited the following benefits with WinSPC

  • Solved fill weight problems in one-third the time by being able to predict problems through trending analysis
  • Reduced downtime and increased yields
  • Attained ROI in three months
  • Reduced unnecessary machinery cycles
  • Enabled the staff to run very lean sure to automated data collection

>>Next: Dana Corporation drives up supplier quality with QualTrend



 
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