Optimization of production cycle times

Many industrial companies struggle with measuring cycle times. Often, these times are estimated on the basis of operators' production start and stop declarations. Less frequently, these data are obtained from machine controllers. Most often - there is no reliable data ...

The measurement method adopted has an impact on the scale of discrepancies between the estimated and actual lengths of work cycles. Their optimization, in turn, is of great importance for increasing the efficiency of the company - having data that most accurately reflects reality is essential.

The production manager in the glass factory reached similar conclusions - the company achieves satisfactory results, and the planning department estimated the reference times of production cycles based on the observation of the work of individual machines. However, the production manager decided to verify them, suspecting that individual lines still had hidden production capacity.

It was necessary to measure the actual times of activities executed at individual workstations, over a much longer time than a few days, as previously carried out by the planning department using gemba observations.

FitMech sensors were installed on the reference production line - data on work cycles and downtimes began to be automatically collected and processed.

After a few months, the production manager, together with our consultant, was able to analyze the measurement results - the planned times of production cycles turned out to be as much as 30% longer than the actual ones.

The plant, after adjusting its production plans to the actual efficiency of the machine park, increased its production by several percent without any additional investments.