DS Smith: managing internal processes
Company
DS Smith is a leading manufacturer in the field of corrugated board packaging. The company offers a wide range of products from retail packaging to transport containers, consumer packaging, custom gift packages, POS solutions, and industrial packaging.
The company is organized in four operational divisions: Recycling, Paper, Packaging and Plastics, which work in synergy and make DS Smith the second European paper manufacturing company with 14,500 employees and 190 production plants in 25 European countries.
The company is dedicated to the continual development of innovative solutions to enhance performance, reduce costs, and manage risks.
Critical issues, problems, and objectives
The health and safety of its employees and of the community in which the company operates, together with the protection of the environment, are of primary importance to DS Smith, which has adopted an operational model based on communication and collaboration in closely knit working groups. For many years Sinergest has collaborated as its strategic partner in the field of quality and safety management systems. The company has UNI EN 9001:2008, OHSAS 18001, ISO 14000, EMAS certification for its plants.
Due to the complexity of the legislative and regulatory situation in Italy, the company needed a system to manage and monitor its internal processes in order to guarantee that the conditions and deadlines set by the law are met.
Solution
Since 2000 Sinergest has supported DS Smith in the maintenance and updating of its quality management system. This has involved adapting the system to the updated UNI EN ISO 9001:2008 law and the provision of consulting services for the interpretation of present and new regulations (with a special focus on food contact materials). Support has been provided for the continual improvement of the production process – a fixed goal of the company – as well as for solving organisational problems.
Over the years, with the growing complexity of norms and regulations, not to mention of the industrial processes themselves, the need for more sophisticated management, monitoring and record-keeping procedures has required the company to introduce systems for the computerization of key areas in the production process.
The DS Smith plants in Lucca and Ferrara have seen the gradual implementation of improvements to management in the areas of: complaints; non-conformities; measures to prevent and correct problems and to optimize processes; maintenance; and interactions with suppliers. Sinergest has focused special attention on the needs in specific sectors (operations or monitoring), with the custom designing of interfaces and wizards to simplify processes such as data insertion by the production operators.