Expand Your Efficiency

A general-purpose manufacturer finds efficiency through a defect-reduction program.

Company

SOLID Development Corp dba Dream to Product

Location

Evanston, IL

Number of Employees

6

Solutions

  • Operations
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“IMEC brings a lot of great knowledge and hands-on experience. We have worked with IMEC to obtain our ISO certification, enhance our SEO and improve our efficiency targets. IMEC is a great resource, and we are thankful for the relationship.”
Deb Overbey
Director of Sales and Marketing – SOLID Development dba Dream to Product

Situation

Solid Development Corp dba Dream to Product is a general-purpose manufacturer located in Evanston, Illinois. They started their connection with IMEC back in 2017, when they worked together to earn an ISO certification. The certification turned out to be a huge help for Solid Development, as they improved their credibility and built trust for their clients.

Solid Development has a long history of working with high-end clients and has built up a great reputation within their clientele. When Solid Development became a 2nd tier supplier for Weber Grills, however, they were met with extremely high expectations. Weber Grills being a large company meant that their defect standards are significantly higher than the average. To ensure targets were being met, Solid Development reached out to IMEC for help in identifying where potential miscues could stem from and how to resolve them to fit the requirement given.

IMEC Solution

Talking with their IMEC regional manager John Azara, he connected them to technical specialist Margo Barr, who has expertise in this area. Margo made a visit to their facilities to go through the process and help identify potential areas to fix. Doing so opened up their eyes, as the second opinion gave clarity on potential bumps in their efficiency. Solid Development was using check-weight scales, which didn’t have the settings and calibration to fit the defect requirements set for them by Weber Grills. They also noticed that employees, knowing the major demand of the order, were going too fast and not being efficient with the speed.

Margo returned shortly after her visit to Solid Development with several ideas brainstormed for their success. First, they implemented a gate between machines and a larger green light (that went off when a product was good) to ensure that employees slowed down and decreased defect happenings. They also implemented a custom modification to the scale that would output to the gate and light in order to confirm that the product was up to standard. These two changes, along with stressing the importance of quality to their line workers, ended up making a strong difference for their defect reduction and saved their order with Weber Grills. To this day, Solid Development still uses the gates and lights added by IMEC to ensure quality in all their work.

Results
  • Retained Sales: $82,000
  • Labor Savings: $5,000
  • Cap Spend Reduct: $10,500
  • Investments: $5,000
  • Jobs Created: 15
  • Jobs Retained: 10
  • Aggregate Impact: $1,224,075