A ketchup and tomato paste production company faced problems with their supply chain for jar labels, where the high quality labels have long delivery time. Therefore, the company occassionally used labels from low quality suppliers in response to peak seasons of market demand. The main problem of low quality labels was that they were not sharply cut, and the company had to remove them from the jars using excessive water to remove glue together with the wrong cut labels. Thus losses were not only in terms of lost labels, but also loss of water, and loss of production time.
The remedial action was to contact label suppliers, to improve the sharpness of the cutting blades, to use glue that requires less water if removed, and to investigate for better design of spacing between labels. Those measures should decrease the number of reworked jars, reduce the water and packaging material losses, and increase the availability of the packaging machine.