How to track downtime in your packaging manufacturing line in 7 steps

Understand how often and why your packaging line is stopping Knowing how often your production line is stopping is one of the most important single things a production manager can do to start improving productivity. This comes before OEE, for two simple reasons: downtime is an actionable metric and easy to understand. Digital Maturity in the Packaging Industry Benchmarking Report: Download it now for free! There is a lot of theory as to how to do that. It is covered by Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. Although it is important to understand the theory and we encourage you to study it, what we see in reality is that what most companies need is an easy-to-use and effective system. Therefore, we divide this into 7 steps. The reliability of information is the number one priority when it comes to data. People do not use the number they do not trust. And time is a difficult one to track without an automatic system. It’s easy to measure (you just need a stopwatch, right?), but it’s difficult to track. Many companies ask their operators to log downtime on a spreadsheet. “Every time the machine stops, you…

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7 Biggest Mistakes Packaging Factories Make With OEE

OEE + Packaging Manufacturers + Challenges Every production manager is familiar with OEE (an abbreviation for the manufacturing metric Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and has tried to implement it in their factory. For a production manager, OEE is almost as important as his or her credit rate, body mass index or golf handicap. It carries the simplicity of being a single number and this is great. However, there are many traps to avoid when using this in your factory to know if you are doing it right or not. Below we would be outlining the most frequent mistakes packaging manufacturers make when using the “holy number”. 1. Comparing Apples To Bananas Since it is a single number, people tend to use it to compare different factories, as a method of comparing their efficiency. This is a dangerous game, for some reasons: Not all companies calculate OEE the same way. Actually, if you ask 10 production managers how they calculate OEE, you will get 11 different answers. Some exclude preventive maintenance from the availability calculations, others exclude holidays others don’t. Batch sizes and process inherent particularities can hugely affect OEE. Take for example a film extrusion line compared to cosmetic plastic…

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