In February, our Continuous Improvement (CI) team held the first-ever CI Champions Award Gala to celebrate the top two teams and their outstanding initiatives.

Our first place team is from our Newberry Cement plant, whose CI project focused on improving the reliability of their Raw Mill #2. They identified this as a major bottleneck in their operations. By applying the DMAIC methodology they learned in Argos’ Yellow and Green Belt training,  they began reviewing and improving their maintenance process and planning by relay on inspections, prediction, and analysis for failure. As a result, they saw an 86% reduction in incident hours as compared to the previous year and a reliability improvement of 2%, leading to $310 thousand gained in production loss avoidance.

“I think this program is good to show to the rest of our plant so they can start to adopt this type of methodology, and moving forward, they are more eager to jump in and use lean six sigma on future projects and support our CI Team . This recognition of our efforts amplifies the importance of improving our processes and shows our teams that we have support from the top down.” -Adam Leeds, Newberry Cement Green Belt Project Leader

Second place is our Raleigh-Durham team, who focused their efforts on improving their operational efficiency through restructuring their operations to use their time and resources efficiently. They worked and identified locations in their operations that were not strategically located near customer demand and reallocated resources, including drivers, operations, and maintenance personnel. Through analysis, the team has been able to calculate the will be able to achieve a variable plant cost savings of $186,500 and increase the average loads per day from 3.2 to 3.5 loads/day per ticketed driver. This increase equals about 12.3 more loads (or 100 yards) per day. 

“We really appreciate the CI team for recognizing us.It really means a lot to us in the Raleigh-Durham division to present a project that was selected and will help us in our future endeavors in the division. -James Walters, Raleigh-Durham Division Manager

“Season 1 was a home run! We had fantastic submissions from both Ready-Mix and Cement plants which resulted in some really intriguing projects that made it to the final stage. I personally enjoyed talking with the teams and seeing their progress along the way and how an idea became a successful project. Each of these projects showed a great deal of thought, teamwork, and success, which will help Argos take that next step. We had a wonderful time at the Awards Gala. The awards finalists presented with such confidence, and it was rewarding to see them engaged in great conversations with the program sponsors and our new CEO Simon. 

We want to take the momentum from Season 1 and build on it. We can’t wait to see all of the ideas and projects coming for Season 2.”

Jonathan Sandoval, CI Portfolio Manager

Want to be a part of Season Two of the Continuous Improvement Championships? Submit your ideas for a CI initiative to the Continuous Improvement Office at continuosio@argos-us.com.