Background

Established in 1995, Ultimate Paper Box (UPBX) started as a 4 person company working in a 2,000 square foot shop. Today, UPBX has grown to over 100 employees working in a 130k square foot warehouse. UPBX has thrived as a large contributor of folding carton innovation with its continuous process of reinvesting into its capital equipment and employees. UPBX is now a recognized preferred manufacturer of folding carton and litho labels, being named one of the fastest growing companies in the packaging industry by Trade Magazines.

Challenge

As with every company that scales, UPBX faced a particular challenge as they began to increase their number of operating machines, salespeople and warehouse workers. It began to get increasingly difficult to streamline communication between departments, maintain update to date schedules for the machines on the factory floor and track job statuses throughout production. Using WorkClout, UPBX was able to solve all their issues to be leveraging the features below.

1. Production Scheduling - Changes to the schedule were managed via an excel sheet that was saved on on-prem servers. 
2. Floor Reporting - In order for operators on the factory floor to know what had to be done someone in production would have to manually print, cut and post the excel on each station for every employee shift. 
3. Job Statuses - Because production was planned and worked on manually, getting an update on a job status required walking the 130k square feet warehouse to ask if and when a particular run would occur and when it would be complete.

To sum up, this was a highly error-prone, restrictive, and manual process that resulted in countless hours lost as UPBX began to scale its operation and team.

Why WorkClout?

Using WorkClout, UPBX was able to completely automate three of their biggest bottlenecks as their operations scaled. This enabled their production managers, salespersons, and operators to stay on the same page and instantly get status updates without having to track people down within the facility.

1. Production Scheduling - Using WorkClout’s production schedule, UPBX is now able to maintain control and visually see your schedule for each machine or station for any given time period. Data is collected and displayed almost instantly on the schedule.
2. Floor Reporting - Leveraging WorkClout’s Operator Portal, UPBX operators are now able to instantly get a priority list of runs that have been scheduled per day. 
3. Job Statuses - Using WorkClout’s workflow management and notifications, employees at UPBX can instantly know where a job was in production with a click of a button.

Summary

UPBX has been using WorkClout for nearly a year now and has seen a huge increase in productivity. UPBX has recently announced the purchase of 3 new industrial machines, including one of the first Heidelberg Speedmaster XL to further increase their production throughput.

To summarize, we’ve estimated that over 300 cumulative hours are saved each month at UPBX after the adoption of WorkClout. This equates to an annual increase in overall profit margin by +$72,000 taking average labor hours and cost into account.