Batesville Casket Co.-Vicksburg Operations, Vicksburg, Miss.
Employees: 177, union
Total Square Footage: 197,816
Primary Product/Market: wood component parts for caskets
Start-Up Date: 1975
Achievements: 55% reduction in cost of quality since 2006; 76% reduction in OSHA-recordable injury and illness cases in past three years; 2007 IndustryWeek Best Plants winner.
Working with lumber is a challenging business. By its very nature, every board is unique and thus it immediately tests any manufacturer's efforts to reduce variability. Additionally, a characteristic of the unfinished wood is that it always is trying to adjust to its environment.
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| Batesville Casket associate Joe Harris feeds the optimization scanner, which determines the optimal yield for every board it processes. |
"It's completely adaptive, and that's a bad thing," says Danny Hudson, quality assurance manager at Batesville Casket Co.-Vicksburg (Miss.) Operations. In short, slight environmental influences, such as fluctuations in humidity, can change the material even after processing, often in transit, complicating efforts to maintain quality.
Nevertheless, Batesville's Vicksburg facility does it -- maintain quality, that is. Its success at doing so is imperative, for this plant annually processes more than 18 million board feet of lumber to deliver wood component parts to assembly operations at sister plants in Mexico and the United States.
The facility's attention to quality begins outside, in the lumber yard, where qualified vendors deliver "green" lumber, which is product that has not yet been dried. There, Vicksburg lumber inspectors evaluate each board to assure it meets standards set by the National Hardwood Lumber Association. Lumber that passes inspection moves into Vicksburg's state-of-the-art drying facility.
Alesia Mathes, drying systems group leader, describes the processes that occur before the milling operations as the "front line defense" for the plant. Additional defenses against quality defects include layered process audits, which were introduced early in 2010.
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| See the other winners of IW's 2010 Best Plants award and find out how they made the top ten. |
Batesville conducts layered process audits along the plant's entire production process, from the lumber yard through to the shipping dock. The audits perform two functions: to assure that process parameters are being maintained as well as to answer the question, "How do we make this process better?" Approximately 195 audits are conducted per month.
"If you control the elements of the process, you control the output," Hudson says.
Batesville's Vicksburg plant remains as engaged in improving its operations as it was in 2007, when the facility first won an IndustryWeek Best Plants award. And greater use of data is helping it to better prioritize projects, says plant manager Russell Johnson.
Vicksburg has worked to "optimize" the yield of each board passing through its plant. (Optimizing the yield refers to achieving the maximum usable product from each board.) In 2007 the plant added scanning technology in several locations as well as new optimizing saws that use information from scanners to make cuts that provide the best yield from each board. It takes the technology just seven seconds to determine how to achieve the best yield for a board.
The introduction of new equipment was simply the beginning of the optimization effort. "We're still on the vertical part of [the learning curve]" with the new technology, says engineering manager Keith Pittman.
In addition, the plant is comprehensively challenging the strategy used to process lumber for best yields. For example, the plant recently launched a project to reduce its re-rip inventory (a byproduct of wood cutting), which both freed up floor space and reduced material handling.
