Today, we sit down with Roger Woehl, CTO of SafetyChain software, to talk about key manufacturing metrics for maximizing productivity in food & beverage and CPG plants. Woehl has a BS in Mechanical Engineering, ten patents, and over 20 years’ experience in developing innovative B2B SaaS solutions.
1. What are the top metrics CPG manufacturers should use to measure plant productivity?
There are a lot of important metrics to choose from: but the main ones I’d focus on for productivity are yield, downtime to operating time ratio, and throughput (using SPC). They are made up of many smaller data points and metrics, and will give plant managers insight into daily operations that could be losing them money.
2. How can you measure yield, downtime, and throughput?
The data points can be collected using sensors and equipment on the plant floor, but to arrive at those metrics, it’s important to analyze the raw data. That’s why SPC (statistical process control) exists. When done right, you can immediately see when a process has deviated from its ideal behavior and take action on it.
For example, if your oven temperature is too high for one 8-hour shift, all the bread or cookies that come from that line will be misshapen, too hard, or otherwise unsellable. If you were tracking these metrics with SPC, you would have caught that issue much earlier and saved yourself from scrapping the product.
3. What is SPC and how does it work?
SPC stands for statistical process control, which is a method that uses statistics to monitor manufacturing processes to confirm that the products being produced are meeting spec. It can help facilities identify when a process is abnormal, and if you collect the data in real-time, you can avoid a lot of rework, scrap, and non-complying product.
4. Why doesn’t every facility use SPC to track productivity?
Most people measure SPC with a pencil and paper or an Excel sheet, which is extremely slow and cumbersome. When something goes wrong with a machine or a process in a plant, every extra minute it takes to get your data and become aware of that issue is money that you’re losing on the plant floor. That’s the issue we identified at SafetyChain; those who do measure SPC with pencil and paper are spending a lot of time to get only half the value of SPC.
5. Getting SPC data in real-time is key in getting actionable data on productivity— how can we get there?
The Production Manager that we have at SafetyChain does exactly that: we can integrate into sensors on the plant floor, automatically analyze the data, and churn out real-time reporting on downtime, efficiency, yield, and throughput. So instead of realizing a machine is nonoperational during periodic checks, you can pull out your tablet or log on to your computer and see it then and there. Some of our clients have increased their on-time startup by 80% by having visibility into this kind of data.
Learn more about SafetyChain’s Production Manager here.
About SafetyChain: SafetyChain is the #1 Plant Management Platform purpose-built to improve yield, maximize productivity, and ensure compliance standards for food, beverage, & CPG facilities. With fully integrated tools for production (OEE & SPC), safety and quality (QMS), and supplier compliance, our configurable cloud-based software drives real-time visibility and control to optimize performance across all of your manufacturing locations.