Saint Gobain - Global Manufacturing Excellence Programme

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Saint Gobain – Global Manufacturing Excellence Programme

Saint Gobain Glass is a leading global manufacturer of float glass and coated glass products. In an increasingly competitive market they were faced with the urgent need to drive significant improvement in manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies and reduce costs. A key platform for delivering this was the implementation of a global manufacturing excellence programme.

The challenge

Saint Gobain Glass needed support to design and implement a programme to drive productivity improvement and share best practices between 37 float lines and 17 coating plants around the World. Lean Sigma was selected as the improvement method.
The objectives of the global programme were to:

Design and implement a programme to build a sustainable continuous
improvement capability
Develop a framework for sharing best practices
Support launch and delivery of improvement projects in each plant to drive
productivity and quality improvement and reduce costs

The solution

Design of Manufacturing Excellence Vision, Roadmap, and supporting
implementation plan
Development of best practice assessment and auditing tools and methods
Training over 400 Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Green Belts from 20
countries
Coaching and mentoring of global deployment team to guide successful rollout
to each plant
Project coaching support to ensure successful project and benefits delivery

The results

Business impact over a 3 year period:

World Glass Manufacturing Excellence Programme successfully established in
30 Plants
>150 Improvement projects completed
Benefits per annum exceeded 15million euros pa