Employee Teams Redesign Order Processing at Colorcon

"Life's a batch" became the rallying cry when Colorcon, one of the world's leading manufacturers of edible colorants and non-toxic inks, embarked on improving satisfaction and profits by streamlining its order processing operations. With Tunnell Consulting as consultant and trainer of employee process redesign teams, Colorcon quickly determined that its order flow was being bogged down by "batching." Colorcon Project Leader

"The new center will be a buzz of activity. It'll reduce cycle time, reduce idle time, and do away with waiting for the mail to make its way to the next building."

Andrew Hagel explains orders were sitting on desks in batches waiting for mail delivery between departments located in different buildings. As the batches piled up -- from desk to desk to desk -- notification to planning was being delayed by hours and sometimes days.

"As we flow-charted our process," explains Hagel, "we realized that many things were being batched on the front end, and we could actually walk an order through from sales to credit to planning in far less time. We decided to make some drastic changes."

The biggest change recommended by the team assigned the job of dissecting front-end delays was a physical consolidation of service departments. Management agreed that the overall bill for such a sweeping undertaking -- the cost of physical construction, the labor of relocating people and files, and the time for retraining -- would cost far less than the price of doing things the wrong way. And so, a new Customer Operations Resource Center was constructed at Colorcon's West Point, PA headquarters. Sales, credit and planning were designed within earshot in the same room-without-walls.

Hagel, who calls the new center "a buzz of activity," says the consolidation reduces cycle time, reduces idle time, and does away with "waiting for the mail to make its way to the next building."

Although the new information center is the biggest of the changes implemented thus far -- Hagel says the continuous improvement teams "left no stone unturned" in scrutinizing order processing operations for even the smallest inefficiencies. Hagel says some 147 suggested changes were made by the teams, representing "every little thing" that could possibly "make the process slicker." Things such as changing verification report practices and improving inventory comprehension, simplifying credit check policies for low-risk customers, and reducing report redundancy and modifying procedures.

On the back end, when an order is complete, recommended changes are also being implemented that will speed up delivery. These include "quick hits" such as the physical relocation of computers and enhanced reports that give packers and shippers more timely access to information.

"What we realized," says Hagel, "is that every change we make doesn't have to be a slam dunk. Some can be minor adjustments. We learned if we keep these minor adjustments going and make major ones when necessary, we can better serve our customers."

We congratulate Colorcon on its ongoing continuous improvement effort; we were especially impressed with the enthusiasm and commitment of the employee teams that worked on the order flow project. We have continued to help the company move forward with an analysis of manufacturing processes so it can match its newly improved service with even better products for the pharmaceutical, food and printing industries.

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