The Challenge

AG Hair is known for providing customers with high-quality formulas that suit the intricacies of all hair types and has been manufacturing innovative hair products since 1989.  Recently, AG Hair mobilized their entire manufacturing facility to meet demand for sanitizing solutions to support health organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. To further their innovative culture AG Hair viewed this organizational pivot as an opportunity to review internal processes within Product Manufacturing, Quality Assurance, and R&D Groups.

AG engaged Propel Solutions to identify opportunities to improve efficiencies through improved flow of information, supply chain management, and production scheduling.  The objective of this engagement was to ensure that processes are efficient, effective, and scalable.  This allowed AG Hair to take advantage of future growth opportunities to solidify its market leading position.

The Objective:

The project was conducted within a two-week period and included the following activities:

  • Process Mapping & Review: Propel conducted a review of the production, new product development, and orders and shipping processes to determine opportunities to improve capacity throughout the organization. This was done through interviewing staff, observing work practices, and creating detailed process maps that were critiqued by managers and staff. The resulting “as-is analysis” was used to identify opportunities for process improvements.
  • Activity Based Costing Analysis: Propel conducted a base data review to demonstrate the linkages between the cost and revenue drivers of the organization. Using this analysis, the total cost per output was analyzed to identify the total improvement opportunity available. From here the impact of changing the organizational targets can be modelled to help determine specific improvement objectives in terms of financial and capacity improvement in the areas.
  • Strategy, Forecasting, Production Scheduling, and Management Report Analysis: Propel conducted a review of the tools used by the AG Hair Leaders to manage processes. From this analysis, Propel was able to identify missing tools that could be developed to increase staff engagement, improve capacity, and communicate daily expectations to staff

The Results

Staff engagement throughout the analysis was high with over 130 opportunities for improvement identified. The Rapid Level Set Assessment provided AG Hair with baseline measures of their current state and identified the opportunity to introduce a Management Toolkit to improve the management of key processes, improve forecasting and production scheduling, and increase visibility through daily and weekly reporting of results and Key Performance Indicators.  Propel determined that through process improvement, AG Hair could improve the capacity of the departments by 30%.  This would be achieved through the removal of the non value-added time in the processes.