ConAgra Poultry | Athens, Alabama
Company Information:
ConAgra Poultry, headquartered in Duluth, Georgia, employs over 600 people in its 80,000 square foot Athens facility. The chicken processing plant slaughters and packages 185,000 chickens daily or 210 chickens per minute.
Situation:
ConAgra was experiencing declining productivity due to bottlenecks in two production lines: the manual de-boning line and the trim line. The manual de-boning line consisted of eight operators and an eight-step process for removing the wings, white meat and tenders from the chicken and disposing of the carcass. The trim line consisted of 12 operators who cut off remaining skin and bone and trimmed the white meat. ConAgra needed to eliminate these bottlenecks to increase productivity to an acceptable level.
Center Assistance:
After an initial plant tour at ConAgra by ATN-UAH staff, a kaizen, or continuous improvement, project led by senior industrial engineering students was proposed. Two facilitators were chosen from the 11 students in the senior level design class. The facilitators toured the plant, videotaped the operation of both lines, developed a layout of the lines, defined the process flow and collected station and operator cycle times. The information was then presented to the other participants, and opportunities for improvement were explored. After prioritizing and evaluating the opportunities, the results were sent to ConAgra management. In the end, seven opportunities for improvement were suggested for the manual de-boning line and six were suggested for the trim line.
Results:
Within one week of receiving the students’ input, ConAgra implemented two of the suggestions. First, the company automated the carcass removal on the manual de-boning line. And secondly, they reduced the reach required to perform work at the boneless trim table by 12 inches. These two improvements alone resulted in an immediate savings of $100,000 according to Mike McBride, ConAgra Division Industrial Engineer. Utilizing the Kaizen methodology, the process was analyzed and drastically improved in an extremely short period of time.