Jack Kenny05.07.10
The production floor of Cortegra's plant in Indiana
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Improvements in the operation of Vijuk folders, such as that pictured here, was the subject of a kaizen event at Cortegra in April. |
Cortegra is a division of Menasha, a diversified corporation based in Neenah, WI, USA, with more than 3,200 employees based around the world. The two plants that make up Cortegra are located in Fairfield, NJ, USA, and Evansville, IN, USA, and employ 177 people.
Cortegra's New Jersey based operation was formerly known as New Jersey Packaging, which was acquired by Menasha in 1993. In 2006, Menasha acquired Creative Press, an Indiana based company, and in 2007, the two companies were brought together and branded as Cortegra. The companies share nearly redundant capabilities, providing to the healthcare market a full array of secondary packaging needs including; labels, folded literature, flexible packaging, folding cartons, and bound booklets. In addition, Cortegra provides enhanced product technologies in brand authentication, anti-counterfeiting, and new product design and development.
Cortegra's production team, above, concluding a kaizen event focused on improvement of the folding operations. In the foreground is Tom Southworth, Lean Manufacturing facilitator.
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"I believe in Lean," says Struhar, who has a background in finance and manufacturing cost operations. "There is a requirement by our customers that we provide year-over-year cost reduction. For us to deliver this without sacrificing our margins, this can only be accomplished through a Lean oriented work place. Eliminating waste in our operations allows us to reduce our costs and increase our capacity, and allows us to take more volume and achieve our financial goals. During this latest kaizen event we identified that by standardizing work instructions, improving 5S applications and developing off-line setup SMED operations we could significantly improve setup times and reduce downtime."
Sharing success
Cortegra believes in open lines of communication with everyone on staff. "We have a good group, and it's important to communicate with them," Struhar notes. "We have monthly plant meetings, and everyone knows where we are from a performance standpoint. I speak frankly and openly; I don't hide our results; they all know where we stand. We have a success-sharing program, and last year, through our operating results, all employees participated in it. Our success was driven by our cost savings achieved through Lean implementation. It was communicated all along how our performance was doing, the importance of being leaner and cost efficient. They all know the score. They know that this isn't easy. There's no such thing as easy in the economic environment we are in right now. They appreciate the openness and we all share in our success."
One of Cortegra's Aquaflex flexo presses
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"Many times a customer will come to us with a specific need. We chart them, measure them, manage them. We went to one company's facility twice to see our products run on their line. We just want to make sure that everything is right with our products."
Struhar emphasizes that one of Cortegra's main strengths is its wide range of capabilities. "We are one of the few with total redundant capabilities and a real breadth of product lines for secondary packaging. There is not much in secondary packaging that you can think of that we don't do."
The company will design packaging from top to bottom. It will produce bound booklets, catalogs, manuals, and brochures. It will incorporate anti-counterfeit technologies into the packaging, including micro-printing, holography, taggants, threads, frangible papers, and digital watermarks. Cortegra has licensed a process called biometric authentication, which will record the unique fingerprint of the substrate on every piece, at line speed, and store it in a database. "Then you can go out to your distribution chain and you determine if that product was made in your facility or not," says Struhar. "No two are the same."
A Gallus letterpress press |
Conducting business successfully in a field as demanding as healthcare means constant vigilance over cost, quality and innovation.
"The business is out there for companies like Cortegra," says Jim Struhar. "The challenge is to deliver solutions and services at price points that satisfy the customers' needs and achieve the goals of Cortegra. Not at the same price points they were three years ago – not even close. Cortegra has a very good reputation for quality and service – redundant capabilities, multiple locations, everything the customer wants. Now the focus is on our ability to take on larger volumes at lower price points, and Lean operations will be the driving force in accomplishing this."