Experimental Application of DMAIC for Equipment Efficiency Improvement in Cocoa Processing Plant

In dealing with productivity within the manufacturing operations, the first focus is efficiency improvement. Efficiency improvement can be operational efficiency or asset efficiency. Asset efficiency is best explained by Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Equipment efficiency has been one of the major perennial problems of the cocoa processing plant due to the nature of the raw materials (main crop and lean crop) used. Lean crops proved to be cocoa beans with low quality, low yield, and difficult to process. During lean crop season, equipment efficiency used to drop compared to the main crop. Cocoa processing is the conversion of raw cocoa beans to finished products such as cocoa butter, cocoa powder, cocoa cake, and cocoa liquor. This work looks at the application of DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control) to improve the equipment efficiency in the cocoa processing plant. The methodology used is DMAIC. The define phase gives definitions and scope of the problem, The Measure Phase applies statistical methods to measure the current situation and analyze the phase that gives a proper root cause analysis of the problem. Improve phase tends to solve and improve the situation. The control phase makes use of Control Charts. The case study factory has its Tempering machine as its bottleneck and this recorded 40% efficiency loss. Its overall standard deviation is 2.8244 before improvement and became 2.20 after improvement. Pareto shows that the biggest problem is from the sector control system. This work concluded that DMAIC is well-suitable as the structured problem-solving tool for the cocoa processing company.