The Company: Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, Sunshine Packaging is a leading provider of packaging equipment to a multiple of industries throughout the United States. Their customers include pharmaceutical companies, electronics companies, and all varieties of consumer products companies that use plastic shells in the packaging of their products.

The Business Problem: The variety of uses for Sunshine's packaging equipment results in a large variety of manufactured products by Sunshine. The large number of products resulted in many different size and specification requirements of tubing.

Maintaining and locating inventory for production at the right time was a major problem for Sunshine. It didn't help that the receiving department sometimes mislabeled similar materials. Production frequently came to a halt as the right material was located. Write-offs due to improper cutting and lost material was excessive.

The Solution: TSI worked with Sunshine Packaging to develop the list of parts for each of Sunshine's products. In addition, Sunshine's part number and its usage sequence was noted by TSI.

Sunshine would then place orders with TSI based on its product number. TSI would produce all the parts, cut to length, used in that product. Each part would be labeled with Sunshine's part number. The parts would be packed in the order in which they were used. Each box was clearly labeled to match to the product in production.

Sunshine would then receive for each production order only the parts need to assemble that particular piece of equipment.

The Result: "Kitting" streamlined Sunshine Packaging's entire pre-production process and has been so successful that Sunshine currently stocks by 'kit" for commonly ordered products. In addition to streamlining pre-production, there is far less scrapping and write-offs due to incorrect cuts and lost material.