Project Jenga- Elimination of Manual Handling of Frozen Liquid Egg Product

Project Jenga’s goal is to decrease non-value-added work and remove ergonomic risk through the elimination of hand stacking product. The original process for producing liquid frozen product required the manual stacking of all cases two times. The first step involved two employees hand stacking 25 lb. cases for 16 hours (two shifts) into a loose stack pattern of 36 cases on pallets to freeze. These pallets went into a blast freezer to meet the regulatory freezing requirements. After freezing, two stakeholders would have to destack the loose pallet and restack the same cases into a 75-case tight stack pattern prior to shipping. Over the years of production with this process, there were many safety near misses and injuries, including musculoskeletal disorder concerns with the amount of labor manually stacking cases. Manually handling packages is our number one ergonomic injury and we had 6 injuries in the warehouse department related to manually stacking products. Furthermore, this was a significant waste in time and labor spent manually handling product (handled 6 different times) instead of other value-added tasks. The solution to this problem involved working with food safety experts, conducting freeze testing studies, and determining a new stack pattern that allowed the cases to freeze effectively while only needing to be stacked once. This eliminated half of the ergonomic risk and labor used for hand stacking cases by reducing interaction with the product from 6 times to 3 times, increased pallet space in the freezer for other product, reduced the interaction between mobile powered equipment and pedestrians, and decreased the amount of product damage. The total cost savings from this project for FY 24 were $16,942 in labor cost with 78,462 cases produced totaling 1,951,164 lbs., as well as an elimination of 523 high risk labor hours (.25 FTE), and a reduction in high risk stacking from 66% for loose stacked pallets to 40% for tight stacked pallets, resulting in a safer working environment and a more engaged team. The only cost for this project was $870 for the temperature recording devices, bringing Return on Investment based on labor hours to $16,072.