Computers & Software
complex because it included third-party partner sites, where products are often made not just for DuPont but also for other companies. This meant the project team had to manage the challenge of eliminating all related, as well as unrelated, product manufacturing landfill waste. The project covered 15 manufacturing and partner
locations dispersed throughout the world, and included sites in Buffalo, NY; Thetford, Quebec; Ulsan, South Korea; Utsonomiya, Japan; Guangzhou, China; Luxembourg; and eight third-party locations in the US. Manufacturing by-products, unusable raw materials,
product scrap, construction debris and even cafeteria waste all fell within the project’s scope. “In all, we needed to look at more than 30 different waste
streams,” Walter says. “For each stream we had to figure out, why is it waste? Where’s it coming from? What are the components? And finally, what can we do about it and how can we change the process?” Given the sheer scope of the project, the team needed to
collect a lot of data to help DuPont and its partners rethink and reengineer Building Innovations’ processes. “What we did first was map out what we were doing,”
explains Walter. “We measured our inputs, the outputs and the waste stream. We used the Six Sigma method called DMAIC, which stands for Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control.”
Solving the problem
Six Sigma methodology was used throughout the three years of the project, so features built into Minitab - the statistical software that’s been used to analyse data in virtually every
major Six Sigma deployment worldwide - were ideally suited to helping the team accomplish their goals. The data- driven approach was critical because it enabled the team to understand not just how much waste was being produced, but also where and why waste streams were generated. “We used Minitab to help us map out steps along the
waste streams,” Walter explains. “As we collected data at different sites, we used Minitab to do linear regression and other analyses, and created boxplots, histograms, and other graphs so we could clearly see what our data were telling us.” The team examined each location thoroughly to
understand exactly how much of each type of waste was generated; where it came from; why it was produced, and how much material in each waste stream could be eliminated, reused, or recycled. “We did a lot of factorial DOE analysis in Minitab to look
at quality versus production time and waste values,” Walter says. “We analysed our data in Minitab to determine how to change a process to reduce waste, while making sure we didn’t affect the quality of our products.” Along the way, the team found surprising ways to reduce
the amount of ‘waste’ generated. “Finding things that we were able to sell was a very pleasant surprise,” Walter says. “For example, now we can sell things such as landscaping stones made from Corian scrap material that previously would have been thrown away.”
Results
The team achieved their goal of zero landfill in the last month of their three-year schedule. “The last 2 million pounds from around the world were the most difficult,” Walter says. “But
Fig 2. The team achieved their goal of zero landfill in the last month of their three-year schedule. Today, a tremendous amount of material that used to end up as landfill gets reused or recycled.
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