Jamestown Container is a corrugated manufacturer, specializing in custom-design packaging solutions. With 5 plants located throughout New York and Ohio, Jamestown addresses an array of packaging challenges, offering a wide variety of services from design, contract services, and litho lamination, to custom box, plastic, and foam packaging. Jamestown Container defines its core business strength as providing customers with customized, cost-effective packaging solutions, fast turn-around, and exceptional quality and service.
Challenge
For manufacturers, the ability to detect quality-related errors throughout the production process remains a constant challenge. In an attempt to address this problem, Jamestown Container created its own quality-detection strategy, the "PRR" process.
“Our PRR process was a manual, offline system that involved a lot of paper pushing,” says Mike Lennox, Jamestown Containers’ Director of Information Technology. “It just wasn’t efficient. Things began to fall through the cracks.”
Although the PRR process offered slight visibility into Jamestown’s plant operations, the lack of efficiency and accountability began to cause communication issues.
“The fact that our strategy for tackling the issue started to have a negative impact on our customer communication helped bring awareness to the problem,” says Lennox. “Sometimes it took weeks to get back to customers. It was unacceptable and bottom line was that we needed a new quality process.”
Solution
Intent on upgrading its system, Jamestown Container began the search for a more comprehensive solution. A key factor in their selection was finding a system that could not only track quality issues, but also compile the issues in a single repository and offer every employee full visibility into plant operations.
Amtech’s Quality module aims to identify the root cause of quality-related issues and implement a corrective action plan to resolve them. Through the tracking of error sources, the Quality module helped Jamestown Container improve plant efficiency and customer communication.
Lennox adds, “We actually found out about Amtech’s Quality extension at the annual Amtech User Conference. We were really excited when we discovered it, and when we got into the nuts and bolts of it, we loved it.”
Results
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Director of Information Technology
Jamestown Container
Transitioning to Amtech’s Quality extension was a smooth, seamless process. Lennox says, “The downtime was virtually nonexistent and the integration with Amtech's ERP is perfect. Now, we don’t have little pieces of information sitting in different spots. Everything is located in one, central repository.”
Amtech’s new Quality extension enhances the management of the current quality process by taking a simple complaint, request for credit, or returned goods and expediting resolution with integrated CAPA management. Once turned on, the module is easily accessed by most users from new buttons within core ERP screens, including customer, ship-to-order, inventory item, spec, and PDE screens.
“The Quality extension hasn’t only made us more efficient,” says Lennox. “It has made us a lot more disciplined as well. Now we can track our problems and they’re automatically directed to specific departments to focus on what needs to be fixed.”
“Amtech really hit a home run with this one,” he adds. “The Quality extension is everything that we needed it to be.”
