By Jon Kemp
How do you maximize production performance in a company that manufactures products in literally dozens of facilities around the world?
One important way to achieve that goal is by identifying the best methods of production and then translating those optimized processes to K-C mills worldwide. That’s called Centerlining, and at K-C, we’ve adapted this key industrial concept to help us “do the right thing, at the right time, every time.”
“By establishing predictable and consistent running processes, Kimberly-Clark can produce products that meet quality requirements while reducing both cost and variability in our production lines,” says John Franger, engineering technical leader with K-C’s P2005 Global Operations Support Group. “Centerlining has really started to work for us in the last couple of years.”
Aiming for the centerline
Centerlining has been used for many years in a number of production environments, but K-C’s big push behind this approach began in 1997. After the merger with Scott Tissue, K-C launched the P2005 initiative to achieve global cost savings of at least $200 million a year in tissue manufacturing.
The main goal of P2005 is to help K-C mills understand and increase productivity. The identification and use of best practices, and the emergence of centerlining as a unifying practice for all K-C operations, was a natural outgrowth of the ongoing P2005 cost and efficiency effort. Centerlining also has a positive impact on quality. Therefore P2005 has partnered with the corporate quality team to develop the practice and train operations globally.
“Centerlining is about developing a fundamental understanding of our processes and establishing a high degree of discipline regarding the way our people interact with them,” says Clay Hood, vice president of Product Supply for North Atlantic Family Care. “A robust centerlining process will significantly reduce process variability which translates to reduced costs through improved waste and uptime performance.”
A unifying practice
K-C has adapted the centerlining concept to meet the company’s own worldwide production requirements. After collecting relevant data from Consumer Tissue, Feminine Care, Child Care and Infant Care operations in each of K-C’s global regions, it was clear which operations yielded the very best productivity and quality performance. K-C’s P2005 and Quality teams are then worked to meld those best practices into a unifying practice for the entire company.
The centerlining unifying practice incorporates 11 key steps, including the creation of a control plan that serves as a global “user’s manual” for a particular operation, management of the process, logging key settings, process reviews and shift change meetings, troubleshooting and training.
“We use common machines in many production lines the world over,” Franger says. “Now we can pull up a control plan and get ideas for K-C plants worldwide, because with Centerlining as a unifying practice, they all use the same format and the same terminology. That’s a huge benefit.”
Of the more than 2,200 practices listed in K-C’s unifying practice database, to date the centerlining approach is one of just four that has been adopted globally by all regions and sectors within K-C.
Replacing the “black book”
Franger explains one key benefit of centerlining by noting the “black book syndrome” – whereby machine operators once carried a little book containing informal operating settings for their production system. At the start of every shift, operators would “tweak” the machine according to their black book, and each of those tweaks would produce a subtle change in the product flowing from that machine.
“Centerlining is really a way to make sure every operator is reading from the same page,” Franger says. “This technique ensures that a process is operated in the same way during every shift, every day and every month.”
