Case Study
Lean training powers process improvement
at Titan Pro
Titan Pro is an independent, family-owned agricultural inputs company that supplies crop protection and plant performance products, seed, and crop insurance to growers across the Midwest through a network of dealers.
Customer profile
Leaders at Titan Pro, a family-owned agricultural product distributor, understand firsthand why a seamless delivery experience matters to their customers. To successfully manage their farming operations during critical periods within the growing season, farmers depend on Titan Pro to deliver the right products on time, with consistent quality and low prices.
During agriculture’s peak season in the spring and summer, Titan Pro’s mid-sized warehouse staff in Clear Lake, Iowa, routinely worked 60-hour weeks to keep up with demand. The high-volume, fast-paced environment often strained the warehouse team, leading to inefficiencies and errors in process management, impacting dealers and farmers. This sometimes resulted in a deterioration of dealer trust and a decrease in grower satisfaction.
In 2018 Titan Pro’s current COO Dan Gleason attended a weeklong training at North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) on Lean Business Practices, taught by members of Uber Freight Consulting’s training team. These lean methods and concepts were implemented in Titan Pro’s warehouse over the next year, quickly adding efficiencies that reduced the warehouse strain during the surge season and ultimately improving dealer satisfaction.
Opportunity: Agricultural distributor Titan Pro
sees chance for growth
Connect with an expert today to learn how your company can get started with lean Six Sigma training.
Connect with an expert
The process improvement training that Uber Freight’s Consulting team has provided to more than a dozen employees has transformed value flow, customer satisfaction, and company culture at Titan Pro over the past five years.
Since the training began, Titan Pro has seen a 70% growth in sales, significantly increased warehouse efficiency, and greatly reduced overtime hours without significant changes in staffing. Claims have dropped from nearly 80 to as few as three per year, representing a major reduction in errors. Gleason attributes these changes directly to process improvements precipitated by the lean and Lean Six-Sigma training. This year’s hands-on initiatives are also projected to save the organization more than $200,000.
But the true value of the training is more than just the individual projects. It’s the infectious lean mindset, which Gleason says has spread across the organization. All team members, regardless of whether they’ve taken the training, are now guided to apply lean operating principles to improve functioning across departments. Results from these ongoing improvements have created greater operational efficiency and buy-in across teams.
“The culture of process improvement has created a sense of pride and ownership among our team members,” says Gleason. Moving forward, Titan Pro plans to send four staff members to earn their Lean Six-Sigma Black Belt with Uber Freight Consulting. With Lean Six-Sigma tools in place, and lean values guiding business decisions, Titan Pro’s team is poised to continue honing their improvement mindset, ultimately resulting in long-term value for their team and their customers.
Results: Learned skills empower employees to achieve
first-time product quality standards at a 99.8% rate
After two years of internal lean training, Titan Pro first sent staff members to a Lean Six-Sigma training to earn Green Belt certification in 2020. This public training was run by Uber Freight Consulting, and hosted locally by North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC), Uber Freight’s partner for Lean Six-Sigma training courses. As part of the training, participants learn the five steps in Lean Six-Sigma process improvement: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC). At the end of the program, they receive the certification, meaning they possess the skills to spearhead process improvement at their own organization.
During the course, participants work with a lean expert from Uber Freight Consulting to address a real issue facing their organization. The first project the Titan Pro team tackled centered on reducing the number of annual claims around product issues. Their work—which was implemented at Titan Pro in 2020—established an effective way to sample seed products to ensure consistency in seed processing and handling practices. In turn, this has reduced claims related to quality.
Based on the success of the first class in 2020, Uber Freight Consulting is running courses exclusively for Titan Pro staff in 2023. The projects aren’t limited to the warehouse. In one project, two Lean Six-Sigma students noticed that the price variance approval process was overly involved, which caused delays impacting dealers. The strategy they developed in class reduced the number of steps by 50% in the first year of implementation, simplifying order processing and improving the dealer’s experience.
Solution: Lean Six-Sigma training provides
tools for process improvement
“The culture of process improvement has created a sense of pride and ownership among our team members.”
Solution
Results
Opportunity
Customer
What is lean methodology?
Lean is a business management methodology anchored in continuous process improvements focused on minimizing waste, with the end goal of maximizing value for customers. Uber Freight Consulting has prioritized lean practices through Lean Six-Sigma for nearly two decades in an effort to improve operational productivity and cost-savings for companies.
Team members have initial exposure to Lean Six-Sigma methodology, can participate in projects and review process improvements.
Yellow Belt
Team members have attended full Lean
Six-Sigma courses, apply DMAIC frameworks to projects and help with data collection and analysis for Black Belt projects.
Green Belt
A level above Green Belt, those with a Black Belt certifications lead Lean Six-Sigma projects to solve business problems.
Black Belt
Those with the highest level train Black and Green Belts, develop business KPIs and strategy, and serve as internal Six-Sigma consultants.
Master Black Belt
Key Lean Six-Sigma belt levels:
