Materials Efficiency at a Massachusetts Coatings Manufacturer

Burdened with non-value-added cleaning steps in the coating firm's operations, a coating manufacturer wanted to reduce costly cleaning steps that used a variety of environmentally harmful chemicals. Pure Strategies examined the company's various loading, mixing, reacting, filtering, transferring, packaging, and cleaning operations to find opportunities to reduce cost, increase throughput, and improve environmental performance. Pure Strategies used the following total quality management tools in its analysis of the coating production and cleaning process:

• process mapping;
• materials efficiency teams;
• statistically designed experiments;
• activity-based cost accounting; and
• goals setting and tracking methods.

As a result of these efforts, the company redesigned equipment and procedures to eliminate the need for cleaning, increased solvent reuse, and placed controls on solvent distribution and application throughout the site. Hazardous cleaning chemical use wereas reduced by 50%. Electricity costs to run the firm's solvent distillation unit were reduced by 60%. The company saved more than $20,000 annually. Over thirty worker-identified changes to cleaning practices were implemented as a result of the project.