Liberty Orchards, a family-owned candy manufacturer with more than 100 years of history is strongly committed to continuous improvement. Liberty Orchards asked consultants from Kaizen Institute to help expand their Lean efforts into the mail order process.

The kaizen project objectives were to increase productivity by 30% and reduce the work in process by 50%. Brad Thomas, Vice President & General Manager, was aware that the mail order process was full of wasteful activity, but the waste findings were not what Brad had expected.

When the process was mapped out, the team learned that one person had to do the following:

1. Walk to get the mail
2. Remove hundreds or thousands of pieces of mail from the bin
3. Manually feed each letter through the automatic opener
4. Pull the orders out of the envelope and attach each with a paper clip
5. Stack orders in a central location
6. Walk to get a small stack of orders
7. Enter orders from the letters into computer system by hand

The telephone operators would process orders when they were not on the phones. They would go to the central location, sort through and find the easiest orders to process. This took time and in the end orders that were not easy were not processed in a timely fashion.

The team saw many opportunities to make the work simpler with better outcomes for the customer. The team decided to

A. Elimination of the mail sorting process
B. Eliminate walking to get orders
C. Complete in the order received

The kaizen events led to a major redesign of the department's processes to result in meeting the kaizen project targets. When asked what the best part of this project was, Brad Thomas answered “Bringing in a new set of eyes to understand, see and define waste.”