The Manufacturing Plants
Applichem has four plants spread across US, Europe and Asia. Their nature and performance is discussed below and summarized in Table (1) :
Gary Plant
It is the company's first large manufacturing facility. It had designed capacity of 26 million pounds a year and produced 18 million in 1982 with 1000 non-union workers.

Advantages: * The plant has very loyal employees, which can lead to low employee turnover rates. Not only are employees loyal to Applichem as a company, but they are also loyal to the plant manager as well. This can be an implication of how well Gary plant employees will react when new production process and training programs are implemented.
Disadvantages:
* The equipment used for the production of Release-ease was installed between 1959 and 1964, which is outdated according to an estimated useful technical life of 20 years. * Gary has 8 different formulations for Release-ease. * Release-ease is produced in 80 different package sizes. * The Gary plant produces 19 other products other than Release-ease. The plant was also designed to be a batch operation, not a streamline operation, which causes production to switch between different product lines.
Frankfurt Plant
The plant supplied in Europe, Middle East and Africa and other Applichem plants. This plant bulk shipped Release-ease to other plants where the product is packaged and shipped to customers. It had 12 product families in addition to Applichem and a deigned capacity of 47 million a year.

Advantages: * With only 600 employees and about 38 million pounds of ease release made annually, the employees at the Frankfurt plant are more productive than any other plant. Also, its production better met specifications. * One piece of equipment used to produce Release-ease was installed between 1971 and 1974, and the other was