October 31, 2022
Every year, Redzone travels around the globe to visit its customers’ plants and learn about the amazing work happening on site every day. The people they meet and the achievements they witness coalesce into Redzone’s annual Community Awards. These awards honor individuals and plants for outstanding work in the areas of productivity, quality, reliability, engagement and more.
To be a contender for Redzone’s Community Awards, nominees need to show outstanding productivity, product quality and safety, and teamwork across departments. Customers looking to take home the coveted Plant of the Year title display a combination of quantitative and qualitative growth in areas like shop floor productivity and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) increases, reduction in waste, improvements in changeovers and career-changing culture. Winners have achieved a clear sense of corporate identity, a collective mission throughout the organization and a cultural transformation that results in a unified team from the frontline teams to senior leadership.
This year, Redzone is proud to announce the following plants and frontline workers as the best of the best among more than 1,000 customers around the globe:
C&S Products Co. Inc.
C&S Products launched Redzone Learning in January 2022 to address staffing and knowledge challenges. As a result, they achieved a 71% reduction in employee turnover. Additionally, after only three weeks of coaching, the team identified over $1.5M in savings and quickly took action, yielding unprecedented results!
Vytalogy Wellness
Over the last year, Vytalogy Wellness’s Santa Fe Springs site incorporated Redzone to create a higher-quality employee culture, increase production output and decrease employee turnover. The team successfully increased output by 30%, and the company’s CEO recently stated the site went from a C- in July 2021 to an A in just one short year.
Georgia Nut Company
Georgia Nut Company turned to Redzone to improve cross-functional communication between all departments and create an emphasis on quality culture – a move that led to $20M in new business in the last two months alone. With their revamped approach to food safety and quality culture, Georgia Nut achieved a massive reduction in food safety-related holds that resulted in savings of over $3M.
Bizzy Coffee
Bizzy Coffee implemented Redzone with the goal of increasing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and reducing employee turnover. Armed with Redzone’s tools, Bizzy Coffee grew from 25% OEE to nearly 70%. This increase allows the team to fill all orders on time and in full without running overtime or weekends, increasing employee satisfaction and retention.
The Gorilla Glue Company
Gorilla Glue set out to boost plant engagement among their frontline workers through Redzone’s software, which nearly all of the plant’s lines use. This led to massive improvements across OEE, productivity, quality, availability, uptime/downtime and more. The changes their team has made will save 500 hours of line time annually and add 1.45 million jars of capacity to the plant.
Samworth Brothers – Kettleby Foods
Samworth Brothers leveraged Redzone to engage their team in new ways and enhance their ability to provide real-time data and instant communication across the entire plant. Multiple Kaizen events also enhanced their standard work and increased their Units Per Man Hour – driving OEE performance forward and resulting in an estimated $140K in annual savings and 20% productivity increase in just 90 days. [Note: Unfortunately, Samworth Brothers – Kettleby Foods was not able to make our awards presentation in person.]
Allied Wire & Cable
Allied Wire & Cable’s Operations Team battled through an exciting “go live” and project implementation that saw OEE improvement jump from a baseline of 15% to 40% – an amazing 166% improvement. By the end of the implementation phase, the team had made up so much ground that the pre-project backlog of up to 12 days had been reduced to two days or less, essentially running the team out of work in some areas!
California Natural Products
California Natural Products has been successfully using Redzone’s Learning solution to capture tribal knowledge and develop new processes which has led to 328 Plays to date. As an example, the maintenance team identified the 10 most frequent downtime calls and created Redzone Plays to help upskill operators to address and resolve these issues independently. The culture-changing rollout of the Learning solution has resulted in a 7% reduction in turnover and an impressive 14% uplift in OEE.
noosa yoghurt, a Sovos Brands Company
noosa yoghurt’s maintenance team utilized Redzone’s reliability module to push business performance to numbers higher than any prior year. The team achieved an uplift of nearly 15% on their focus lines and have produced more units out the door in 2022 than any year prior – all in less time. Eight months after the module launch, the factory has 100% involvement of all maintenance techs on the floor.
Creative Snacks Co., LLC: KIND – High Point
KIND – High Point set out to overhaul their database system, aiming to move from a reliance on legacy knowledge to a streamlined, technology-focused system that would also allow the plant to go paperless. Using Redzone’s software, the team quickly started lowering missed checks, with a current sustained 96% pass rate with just 1% missed checks.
Darren Estrada (Dot’s Pretzels Edgerton)
Darren was one of the early adopters of Redzone at Dot’s Pretzels and was instrumental in helping the company with their machine changeovers. Management discovered it was taking over an hour to do a bag and carton changeover, but Darren’s shift was getting it done in 15 minutes. He helped write training documents and came in during his days off to train other shifts on the process. Because of this, Dot’s Pretzels ended up cutting the time to do a changeover on average by 60% with his assistance.
Eucary Pineda (BetterBody Foods & Nutrition)
When Eucary first came to BetterBody from Venezuela, she spoke very little English, but her passion for excellence and team camaraderie was evident through her high level of performance. She quickly rose to line supervisor, where factory leaders quickly noted a significant reduction in her team’s downtime due to setups and cleans. Her team recently presented results to leadership that showed a labor savings of over $70,000 and increase in annual production of $65,000 for just one factory line alone.
Hannah Derksen and Rico Van Oosten (Crest Foods, Inc.)
Hannah, a production lead, and Rico, a line mechanic, took it upon themselves to “Youtube-ify” Redzone’s training program with “plays” that teach other frontline colleagues through high-production videos about sharing knowledge across the factory floor. Factory leadership can already see the learning curve for new employees will be greatly reduced due to Hannah and Rico’s efforts, and the Redzone coaching team has seen the value in utilizing these videos themselves!
Roy Barron (American Sugar Refining, Inc.)
Roy’s biggest contribution to American Sugar Refining’s bottom line was an improvement idea for the company’s machinery, and he harnessed the power of Redzone to track, escalate, and execute the project. He noticed that machinery was getting sent out for rebuild once a quarter as they would become inoperable due to sugar buildup. Knowing rebuilds cost thousands of dollars, he devised a solution for putting positive air pressure on the machinery to keep sugar out, and therefore extend the lifecycle of this critical part.
Congratulations to all our 2022 winners! Looking to add your team to next year’s award winners? Learn more about the Redzone Community.
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