AUBURN — Currier Plastics, Inc., a custom blow-molding and injection-molding manufacturer, is working with four graduate students from Syracuse University (SU) to find ways of improving the molder’s quality by identifying and removing the causes of defects in Currier’s manufacturing process.

Currier Plastics provides custom-molding services for a variety of industries, such as plastic packaging, beauty and cosmetics, amenities, household consumables, electronic connectors, and medical-measuring devices.

The students from SU’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management and L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science are part of the master of supply chain management, master of business administration, and master of engineering management programs, according to Currier.

The students don’t have classes on Fridays this semester, so they use those days to focus on this course work, says Scott Reilly, continuous-improvement coordinator at Currier Plastics.

They’ll either drive to Auburn for instruction, or Reilly will meet with the students on the SU campus on rotating Fridays during this semester, he says.

“So, it’s back and forth weekly. We meet at least weekly at a minimum, once a week, every Friday,” Reilly says.

Besides Reilly, the blow-molding department manager and the maintenance manager at Currier Plastics are also involved, Reilly says.

The students are working on a course that will concentrate on Six Sigma’s “Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control” (DMAIC) process.

Six Sigma is a set of tools and strategies for process improvement that Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MSI) developed in 1981, according to Currier.

Using the DMAIC process, the students’ work is focused on machine changeover, cycle-time reductions, says Reilly.

“In the continuous blow-molding process, we believe that there’s improvement opportunities to reduce our time that we take on machine changeovers, and potentially reduce the number of defects that occur on startup,” Reilly says.

The defects could include problems such as the thickness of a bottle, which Reilly says can occur if the machinery wasn’t adjusted properly during a changeover between products.

“We count the changeover [as the time] from the last good bottle to the first good bottle of the next product,” Reilly says.

The defects could also include bad finishes on a product because certain components in the calibration stations weren’t set up correctly, Reilly says.

These are the types of situations the students will try to pinpoint when they conduct their analysis, he adds.

The changeover times can also overlap employee shifts, meaning several people or groups could be involved, which can also lead to defects, he says.

Reilly is also offering the students a chance to pursue a green-belt certification, which is available through the Lean Six Sigma curriculum.

Lean Six Sigma is a methodology that combines process speed with quality.

“They’re only going to be able to do the define, the measure, and the analyze phases and that should take them to the end of the semester,” he says.

Reilly, who has the green-belt certification, says the requirements take about six months to complete.

The students would then have to complete the remaining two phases of the DMAIC process, which focus on improvement and control, before they achieve green-belt certification, he says.

A green-belt certification means “you’ve completed a project where you have identified and shown improvement in whatever your project was, [and] in this case it would be changeovers,” he says.

As the semester moves along, the SU graduate students will define and analyze the defect problems and recommend improvements.

At that point, Currier officials will implement the suggestions, determine if they’re yielding results, and make the suggesting part of the working protocol moving forward, Reilly says.

“That is the control phase,” he says.

Currier will then track the progress in its changeovers, and if the suggestions lead to proven reductions in time and defects, then the students will be on their way to a green-belt certification in Lean Six Sigma, Reilly says.

The company’s work with the SU students comes in a year when Currier transitioned into a bigger working space.

Currier Plastics completed an expansion project in the spring of this year that increased the firm’s plant from the previous 65,000 square feet to about 120,000 square feet.

The firm generated revenue of $25 million in 2012, up 12 percent from 2011. Currier Plastics is projecting a revenue increase of 10 percent in 2013.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com