Cutting Lead Time from 8 Days to 38 Hours in a High-Mix Snack Facility
A regional snack foods manufacturer was drowning in WIP inventory and missing customer windows. An 18-week lean transformation — anchored in value-stream mapping and a supermarket pull system — reduced lead time by 80% and freed $1.7M in working capital.
The Challenge
The facility ran 140 SKUs across six production lines with batch scheduling driven by forecast, not demand. WIP sat at every hand-off for days. A production order placed Monday might not reach finished goods until the following Tuesday. Customer on-time delivery was at 74%, distributor fines were mounting, and the warehouse was so packed with in-process inventory that operators were staging product in the aisles — a food safety concern.
The Diagnosis
A value-stream mapping exercise revealed a process cycle efficiency of just 4%: of the 8 days a batch spent in the facility, only 44 minutes was actual value-adding transformation. Changeovers between flavors were batching production into large, infrequent runs. No pull signal existed between packaging and blending — blending pushed to a queue regardless of what packaging needed.
The Lean Intervention
We redesigned the production scheduling logic around a pull supermarket between blending and packaging. Blending was given a level-loaded weekly sequence (heijunka) based on actual packaging consumption rather than forecast push. A kaizen event on the top five changeovers reduced them by 68% on average, enabling smaller, more frequent batches. A visual scheduling board was installed on the floor, giving shift supervisors real-time queue visibility without a system login.
The Results
Lead time fell from 8 days to 38 hours. WIP inventory dropped 40%, freeing $1.7M in working capital. The recovered floor space — 18% of total production area — was repurposed for a new third-party co-packing revenue stream. Customer on-time delivery climbed from 74% to 96% in the first full quarter. The facility avoided a $400K warehouse expansion that had been budgeted.
“The pull system sounds simple when you explain it. But watching the floor actually respond to customer demand instead of a spreadsheet — that was the moment our team really believed.”
— Plant Manager, Regional Snack Foods Manufacturer
Engagement Details
- Client
- Regional Snack Foods Manufacturer
- Industry
- Food & Beverage
- Duration
- 18 weeks
Methods Used
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