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5 Single-Shift Continuous-Improvement Projects

Contents

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5 Lines Don’t Deserve Unscheduled Downtime Unscheduled downtime happens fast and understanding why is challenging, given your installed base

Tackle the Tape Head 1 Addressing one of the single largest sources of down time and rework in a packaging operation

Total Recall 2 Addressing the inevitable recall and improving how you monitor conditions after a recall throughout your supply chain

One Shift Outperforms, One Needs Reformed 3 Monitoring and changing behavior to get consistent performance from shift to shift

4 Who’s the Boss? Supervisors They have a significant impact on your operation, but they have very little insight into employees work, and they aren’t notified about issues in real-time

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Introduction

You know what you want in a continuous improvement project. Something affordable within your operating budget like a low complexity, high return project that can be monitored in real-time, focusing on the most painful, costly elements of your operation.

Now isn’t the time for another speculative, costly venture that requires capital budget, weeks of training time, and expensive installations that consume critical human and financial resources.

Wanting to pick the low hanging, high return fruit is such a familiar story that we’ve designed our company to respond to it, as our customers focus on completing single-shift continuous-improvement projects (SSCI).

At SITEFLO, we’ve simply become enablers, and believe strongly that when it comes to continuous improvement projects, you should be able to just do it.

To that end, we want to share five single-shift continuous-improvement projects (SSCI) we’ve completed with our customers that you can start next week to increase your bottom line in a single shift, many of whom have deployed our semi-automated web and mobile-based solution to help. These are all projects you can start next week.

On behalf of our team, I hope this helps on your continuous improvement journey. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you think we can help. Let’s make continuous improvement effortless in 2015 with SSCI.

Brent MacDonald CEO of Xiplinx (developers of SITEFLO)

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Tackle the Tape Head

Problem: You’re running efficiently upstream, and your tape or tape head fails you again. You know what’s next. Rework while your team has to manually tape boxes, product spilling off the line, and costly downtime while you fix the head and reinstall the tape. Hopefully you can fix the problem yourself. It’s more likely that you need to call in additional help.

Solution: Clearly document the performance of your tape head. Mobile

devices can be configured to help you track and share project data in real-time. Configure the mobile device to track metrics like:

•  Case throughput rate •  Number of cases run •  Quantity of incorrectly taped cases •  Reasons for downtime •  Time to correct rework

Tape head issues cause significant downtime in your operation and they are a major source of frustration for your operations personnel. It’s worth documenting the existing performance of your tape and tape-head because there are other solutions that you can trial head to head with your existing technology. Typically on a tape head trial, you can see a difference within a shift.

1 Addressing one of the single largest sources of down time and rework in a packaging operation

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Total Recall

Problem: A product’s been recalled. There are multiple organizations throughout your supply chain affected. Your suppliers are good business partners and your recall teams are all monitoring whether or not you’re compliant with government requirements, which means you’re all concerned with whether or not the right data is being collected during the right intervals. Your approach to monitoring is paper based, too slow, and it just doesn’t work. Biological, chemical, and physical data has to be collected for a defined period of time.

Solution: Digitally record and share the data you’re required to track during the recall period. You and your suppliers are subject to strict requirements, but it’s clear what you have to track, when you have to track it, and why. By recording this information digitally, you can socialize it in real-time on a web enabled dashboard for visibility by all parties concerned, and you can also be alerted when critical values fall outside of the acceptable parameters. Configure a mobile device to track information like:

•  Investigative swab test results •  Routine and investigative finished product test results •  Routine and required microbial testing results on

environment and finished product •  Sanitation rapid method swabs and total plate count

results •  Allergen testing and test results on environment and

finished product

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Other reasons to do it: Using mobile devices can get you efficient access to information, can make the data shareable immediately with regulators, employees, and suppliers, and can provide a good example of how the technology can be leveraged in your operation daily to spot possible issues that lead to recalls in advance. Devices can be tethered, or secured in another fashion to suit the requirements of your operation, and industrial grade cases can protect devices against wear. Mobile device monitoring software can also be leveraged to keep track of where and when the device is being used.

2 Addressing the inevitable recall and improving how you monitor conditions after a recall throughout your supply chain

•  Cleaning chemical and sanitizer chemical

concentration level •  Hot water temperature •  Verification sheets for preoperational visual checks,

mid-shift clean up, and labels •  Verification sheets for metal detector, x-ray, rare earth

magnet, and sifter screens •  Overall monitoring of employees carrying out critical

activities

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You’ve got a sea of intelligence that you can’t access, typically buried in paper forms that employees fill out, or, not accessible at all because you’re not tracking key employee activities. Getting the most critical data into a digital format and sharing it throughout your organization can bring insight you don’t currently have today.

Problem: The day shift outperforms the night shift for a month, and the night shift outperforms the day shift next month. It doesn’t make any sense. You know how much downtime they both create, but you’ve got no good information on root causes, or on group or individual employee performance.

Solution: Enable better behavior with respect to the most critical activities on your line by

providing employees with mobile aides. This gives you the ability to date and time stamp employee actions, gives employees access to operating procedures and steps to complete work electronically, and, provides management personnel with real-time data and alerts on employee activities.

One Shift Outperforms, One Needs Reformed 3 Monitoring and changing behavior to get consistent performance from shift to shift

This enables shift comparisons, and provides you with the data required to complete root cause analysis on critical issues. Consider configuring a mobile device to track the following activities: •  Operator presence and consumable materials availability •  Preoperational checklist •  SKU matches the production schedule SKU •  Downtime reasons •  Sanitation procedures •  Rework required •  Maintenance activity •  Monitoring of any other other values required in real-time

relating to plant performance

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Problem: It’s the end of the day, and your supervisors have been troubleshooting for most of it. The unscheduled down time didn’t help. They’re back at their desk, with a stack of paperwork sitting in front of them, most of which will be reviewed at the end of the week if it gets keyed into a spreadsheet. Even after a quick review, they’ve discovered three other critical issues they missed that they could have responded to immediately if they were notified.

4 Who’s the Boss? Supervisors They have a significant impact on your operation, but have very little insight into employees work, and they aren’t notified about issues in real-time

Solution: Provide supervisors with an aggregated, dashboard view of the critical activities completed by employees that are required for supervisor review, including ways in which employees deal with problems and alerts that they encounter. Leverage alert functionality so that supervisors get text messages and emails when employees enter data that is outside of normal circumstances. With the right technology, supervisors can simply scroll through a list of logged data and events, received in real-time and categorized by user and activity after a quick review of a real-time dashboard. Make it possible to interact with each event and to provide comments or notes on corrective actions. Reports can be printed with ease, providing a complete picture of your operation and a powerful trail of intelligence for data mining.

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5 Lines Don’t Deserve Unscheduled Downtime Unscheduled downtime happens fast and understanding why is challenging, given your installed base

Problem: It’s the end of the week and you’re finally getting around to reviewing reports, only to find out that there was significant downtime on a line and you don’t know why. You’ve got three different teams in your operation pointing the finger, but it gives you no insight into what happened or how long you were down.. All you have is a paper note with a few thoughts on why, and the writing is barely legible. Solution: Track downtime either in real-time, or immediately after following an event using mobile devices. You don’t always have the luxury of a sensor logging an unscheduled event for you and the downtime data collection process is typically second to getting your line back up. So, the process has to be as simple and streamlined as possible. Consider logging when the line stopped and when it started again, how much rework was completed, whether or not production was affected, and other critical values.

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At SITEFLO, we employ a proprietary value mapping process before we take on a single-shift continuous-improvement (SSCI) project. It's an important part of the work we do with our customers, and helps SITEFLO and our partners define success criteria, as well as uncover opportunities where our products and services can create the most value. You should start a similar process to select the most appropriate single-shift continuous-improvement project (SSCI). Through our work, we’ve developed a compendium of question based opportunities for investigation in your environment, that you can likely leverage in your operation. Below is a sample of some of the questions our field based sales representatives are asking. We’ve got more than this to share, but consider some of your answers to these questions, and the intelligence you could possess with the answers:

Getting Started

1.  What are your human-machine-interfaces (HMI’s), manufacturing execution (MES), and ERP systems not telling you? Could you deploy a simple product to collect more data to learn more?

2.  How is your labor force performing? Is one shift operating more effectively than another? Could you compare their performance if you had a product to measure the activities they do day-to-day, or on specific projects?

3.  What additional value can you draw from the data you have to collect day to day to meet compliance and other regulatory requirements? If your start to collect it digitally, could you uncover anything interesting?

By sharing lessons learned and contributing to our community, we think we can ultimately improve the way we manufacture. Please reach out and keep the single shift continuous improvement discussion going with us at www.mysiteflo.com, or reach out directly by email info@xiplinx.com. More continuous improvement e-books, case studies, audio and video content to come in 2015!

4.  How often are your systems (like conveyors) operating without product consistently flowing through? Where are the bottlenecks? Where could more data help you identify efficiencies?

5.  Are you a form-based operation, burying intelligence in stacks of paper filled out by technical personnel, only to have to enter this into an electronic database?

6.  Do you have well trained technical personnel, and are you providing appropriate job aides so that employees can do their work efficiently and effectively?

7.  What alerts and alarms are you not receiving today that you wish you could receive? What control limits matter, and how much do you understand about whether or not you’re within them when you think about your installed base today?