## Rapid Response$^{A ‘pit stop’ idea leads }$ 

Our Simpsonville, South Carolina operation produces a wide variety of Sealed Air’s food and protective and specialty packaging products. Although we constantly seek ways to reuse scrap in our operations, our ultimate goal is to eliminate scrap generated in our processes — and sometimes the focus on scrap yields unexpected capacity and productivity increases. Recently, a team at our Simpsonville, South Carolina facility tackled long-held assumptions about scrap generation during a part of the manufacturing process. After careful study that included team- based problem solving, detailed cause and effect analysis and rank ordering of the opportunities, the team implemented a new idea. Borrowing from automobile racing, the new action plan adopted a “pit stop” approach, which provided rapid, organized responses to line problems. The work of the Simpsonville team resulted in improved equipment uptime and a yield enhancement with virtually no investment required. Their work improved productivity, reduced scrap and effectively increased capacity — all of which add value to Sealed Air’s business. 

