Con Yeager Spice Company
Value Stream Mapping (VSM) Assistance
Con Yeager Spice, Inc. is in Zelienople and New Castle, Pennsylvania and has approximately 80 employees. They are supplier of products include spices and mixes for the commercial and residential food markets. Con Yeager operates a their own storefront in New Castle and their commercial clients include local companies: grocery chain Giant Eagle, meat producer Uncle Charlies Sausage Company, and multiple deer processing facilities throughout the region.
Con Yeager has been slowly growing the business throughout the pandemic and with the trend of people performing more cooking, the demand for the spices and blends have increased. The company has been forced to decline orders because of the overall volume capacity. Catalyst Connection provided Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to determine where in the process could improvements be implemented
Catalyst Connection worked with the process owners and walked the entire production system, from raw material ordering to shipping finished goods, which also included how the current ERP system worked with actual production needs. During the process review, there were multiple areas of wastes (non-value-added activities) identified. Using the data collected by Catalyst consultants, an improvement roadmap was created and presented to the leadership team at Con Yeager.
As the output of the value stream assessment, the following items were identified:
- Understanding of capacity and raw material requirements needs to occur
- Workplace organization and workflow opportunities are present
- Overall facility layout changes
- Scheduling and batch size reduction
- Quick Changeovers
- Process updates to include accurate usages
As a result of this project, Con Yeager Spice will continue to work on their improvement efforts by partnering with the University of Pittsburgh Industrial Engineering department to perform analysis on facility improvements and supplying real time simulation to determine best use of resources. By implementing the improvements, Con Yeager expects to have growth for the next decade to become the leading supplier of spices in our region.