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Citadel Plastics is leading the future of compounded plastic materials. The company excels in creating unique solutions for our customers in electrical, agriculture and automotive, healthcare and housewares, and everything in between. Citadel offers unparalleled breadth and depth of knowledge, technology, and operational agility, expanding the boundaries of materials and technologies.

Situation:

Citadel Plastics has seen considerable growth in the past five years, as well as a more sophisticated customer base.  As a result, there were difficulties meeting customer expectations.  There was an increase in customer complaints and lost business opportunities.  After a thorough internal analysis, Citadel Plastics identified a lack of root cause analysis into many of their manufacturing problems. 

Solution: 

The company reached out to Purdue MEP, who identified several programs that could help Citadel Plastics grow, increase productivity, and reduce variation in their process.  Citadel Plastics selected a group of employees to participate in 8D Problem Solving Training and Six Sigma Green Belt Certification.  The key for the company was Six Sigma training.  This foundation enabled the company the opportunity to become a more advanced organization. 

Results: 

All of the resulting projects are in the final stages of development.  Here are some of the results and expectations of the projects:

• Product capability improvement (Cpk from 0.15 to 0.34) which will help to maintain a key customer with approximately $1.3 million in annual sales;
• Product capability improvement (Cpk from 0.47 to goal of 1.0) which will show a possible financial impact of $161,000;
• Inventory improvement project with a possible $13,000 improvement;
• Improve new sample turnaround time with a potential impact on new business of $7-20 million dollars in sales; and
• Reduce the standard deviation on a product for one of our top customers with retention of $1.1 million dollars in sales. 

“We feel the training will dramatically improve the base capability of many of our associates beyond the individual projects.  Purdue has done an outstanding job of developing the training materials and executing the programs for us.  The current pace of manufacturing in our area does not allow for slower more traditional forms of training implementation that local colleges offer.  With the MEP program we can get the training quickly, implement immediate changes, and see the long term benefit from the knowledge our people gain.”

Richard J. Sevic, Quality Director, Citadel Plastics