Reducing Equipment Downtime with a Lean Six Sigma DMAIC Approach

A self-serve beverage equipment manufacturer was in trouble. Their blender, deployed in thousands of convenience stores, was experiencing critical reliability issues: water leaks, firmware crashes, and hardware faults that caused downtime and customer frustration.

Stores reported blenders arriving with defects straight out of the box and quickly running into problems: auto-sanitization timeout issues, a faulty operating system and critical leaks leaving stores with overnight water damage.

Every breakdown meant lost sales – covering costly service calls, shipping out spare parts for free, extending warranty periods, and customers deciding against upgrading to the company’s newer model. For the manufacturer, the damage was an estimated $2.4 million in annual sales losses.

Ready to make meaningful changes, a crossfunctional team was mobilized to identify root causes and implement lasting improvements across design, production, and support.