Define: Eliminate paying extra demurrage charges on rail cars.

Measure: Paying over four days' demurrage on some rail cars. Any demurrage charge over allowed is a defect.

Analyze: Rail car traffic, switch engine schedule, rail company operating rules, operating company procedures, spotting procedures.

Improve: Changed sequences of handling empty and full cars. Modified loading times by less than two hours. Result is essentially no demurrage, over the allowed, for the entire site.

Control: Rail company changed procedures, and operating company changed scheduling practices.

Define: Distillation tower has internal damage, limiting production rates. Next outage is scheduled in one year. If outage is taken now to repair damage, we will still have to take outage in one year because of parts delivery for other essential projects.

Measure: At anything over 85 percent of capacity, the distillation tower will not perform. With six months of effort, operations engineers and process engineering could find no solution other than to take an early outage. Anything less than 100 percent capacity is considered a defect.

Analyze: Identified key operating variables, established allowable ranges for each, and conducted a designed experiment.

Improve: A single set of conditions allowed operations at 102 percent of capacity without problems. At that level another part of the plant became the bottleneck. Increased capacity until scheduled outage was worth $6 million.

Control: All shift operators were trained for new conditions, and the operation's procedures were modified.

Define: Marketing has designed a "fancy"...