Business Issue: Reduce Environmental Impacts
Six Sigma reduces material consumption and costs

Adopted by many world class organizations, including some companies in Alcan Packaging, Six Sigma is a process improvement initiative that focuses on dramatically improving business performance.

The pharmaceutical and cosmetics packaging sectors of Alcan Packaging have been fully immersed in the Six Sigma process since early 2001. This methodology delivers value to customers by systematically defining, measuring, analyzing, improving and controlling the way companies work to reduce or eliminate errors/defects.

With extensive team training and gradual experience with these new concepts, tools and techniques, the results have been tremendous. Sixteen teams are well on their way to providing savings of over $2 million.

For example in 2002:

• The glass tubing operations of Alcan Packaging at Wheaton Tube Drawing in Millville, New Jersey, reduced Zirconium contamination in their molten glass from 7.2% to 1.2%; an improvement worth over $300,000 a year.
• Pharmaflex, Alcan Packaging's flexible packaging operation in Cramlington, U.K., set out to reduce scrap from 19.9% in 2001 to 13.9% in 2002. By September, they had not only surpassed their objective, they also benefited from reduced customer complaints, increased capacity and reduced costs.
• The North American plastics operations of Alcan Packaging (Wheaton Plastics' eight locations) set a goal to reduce material scrap by 25% by January 2004. As of July 2003, material scrap had been reduced by 17% and the operations were on track to surpass the 25% goal. The project has already saved more than $150,000 and sparked the development of two more Six Sigma teams to further improve material utilization.