About

Starting Semester: Fall 2026
Assigned: No
Location: Social Circle

Hood Container

Client Profile

Hood Container’s Converting Division offers a wide range of products and services that allow us to partner with our customers to create customized packaging solutions. Made up of sheet plants, corrugated facilities, and packaging services locations, this division truly brings the mill to market. With a full range of corrugated products including traditional brown boxes, moisture barrier solutions, displays, shelf-ready packaging, and large-format offerings, we can tailor packaging to customer requirements. Along with corrugated products, our Converting Division also features high-end graphics, digital printing, and graphic and structural design services to provide clients unique, colorful, and innovative ways to create lift for their products in store and online. Additionally, our Packaging Solutions operations serve customers that require kitting, assembly, and fulfillment—critical steps in the supply chain for getting our customers’ products to their end-users.

Our individual location is a small packaging operation located in the General Mills warehouse in Social Circle Ga and services multiple grocery store partners throughout the Southeast region of the United States. A 1.4 million square foot warehouse, our business operates within a 120,000 sq ft production environment utilizing small equipment such as conveyors, automated wrappers, and shrink wrapping.

Project Description

All packaging services sites are consistent in the fact that they have to open product from their original casings before repackaging them into another vessel. How can we make that more efficient?
1. Flip Box
2. Open from bottom
3. Transport to table/conveyor
4. Dump product
5. Dispose of waste
Do you see waste here? What can you do to optimize this task? Each year, hundreds of thousands of dollars are wasted on non-value added activities just like this. What we are trying to do is streamline this function to optimize the task into the easiest and most efficient means of product transfer available. We have up to a dozen production lines daily with multiple heads performing this task. Our initiative here is a labor reduction through cycle time improvements.

How? – In Scope
Case Opening, Case Transfer, Case Emptying
Ergonomic modifications
Tools / Jigs / Templates
Line Layout modifications

Out of scope - Automation. Due to number of positions and automation costs vs ROI, this project will not take high level automation into account.

Skills

Industrial and/or Process Engineering
Efficiency/Lean Manufacturing
Time Savings / Labor Reduction
Ergonomics

Data Access Requirement