American Greetings: New Beginning

1. American Greetings: New Beginning Team AI: Will Cheesman- Innovation and Creativity Nakul Rajaram- Project Management Andrew Schuch- Technical Contributions Rohit Awade- Communications

2. Background • They are the largest greeting card company in the United States. • Greeting Cards are printed in their Bardstown, Kentucky factory. • Also own Carlton Cards, Tender Thoughts, Just For You, and Gibson Greeting Cards.

3. About Bardstown Facility • Their manufacturing facility is 100,800 sq ft. • Factory has three main processes die-cut, thermo, and packaging. • Work in progress sections fill in the rest of the floor plan.

4. Statement of Need • Analyze floor plan and improve material handling. • Identify bottlenecks in process. • Decrease work in progress area. • Improve overall efficiency of the plant. • Cost justify all alternative solutions.

5. Interesting Facts • The plant manufacture 250,000,000 thermographic cards per year. • American Greetings recently overtook Hallmark to be the biggest greeting card manufacturer in the world.

6. Project Management Gantt Chart

7. Process • All the sheets get a Hot-Press and Die-Cut • Manually transported to WIP • Moves from WIP to Thermographic Card Press • Manually transported to WIP • Carted to Packaging Lines for final step

8. Floor Plan

9. Approach: Workflow • Modeled the entire process on Arena. • Based on drawings and data gathered, made the arena model of the plant. • Identified thermo machines as bottleneck.

10. Approach: Carts • Identified remodeling of old carts as an area to improve functionality. • Make carts more ergonomically efficient. • Improve carts to reduce cycle time. • Increase the volume, reduce WIP. • Reduce potential for injuries.

11. Ergonomic Improvement • Use cost effective carts with electric scissor lifts attached to bottom of skids. • Adjustable work station to keep materials at a comfortable height. • Angled handlebars for smaller risk of injury, along with less effort required.

12. Expected Results: Cart • Reducing the area utilized by Work In Progress(WIP) inventory. • With the larger cart volume, each new cart can about one and a halfold carts. • This would save over 346square feet of WIP area across the plant.

13. Expected Results: Cart • New cart has 52 % more volume. • 66:100 ratio new to old carts • This ratio leads to annual savings of $140,646.28

14. Expected Result: Thermo • Bottleneck in the Thermo section of the plant • 3 Heidelberg (New) • 5 Davidson (Old) • New Heidelberg will increase production and reduce the wait time for the process

15. Expected Result: Thermo • Add Heidelberg (70,000 cards/shift) • Remove 2 Davidsons (30,000 cards/shift) • Wait time reduced by 24% • Overall throughput increased by 14%

16. Recommendations • Convert all old carts to our new design. • Purchase a new heidelberg thermo machine. • New Electric scissor lift cart

17. Conclusion • Got to experience first hand the inner working of a manufacturing unit • Learnt the importance of a team in real life situations • Communicating and working with real clients

18. Thank you! Contact Email: nrajaram@purdue.edu