Background
One of the leading breweries in Germany brews and bottles approximately 4.2 million hectolitres of beer and beer mixed drinks at several locations each year. Market and customer demands have led to significant increases in product diversity over the last few years. The growing number of products has helped the company to defend its excellent competitive position in the mid-term.
However, the variety of product offerings poses new challenges to processes in planning, bottling and maintenance. On account of the constant high demand, the majority of plants are operated in three shifts. This means that the time allocated to preventive maintenance measures and fault analyses has decreased continually.
At 80%, the share of reactive maintenance has reached an extremely critical level. Changeovers between product lines and formats as well as clean-up and set-up times are permanently rising. With little standardisation, they increase the number of unproductive auxiliary processes and sink the capacity to maintain delivery levels at all plants. Additional shifts for cleaning and set-up are necessary leading to overtime and extra work.
The negative effects can be seen equally in both bottling and maintenance and are ultimately reflected in the rising production costs per bottled hectolitre.
Various efforts, analyses and measures undertaken by the client have not led to any sustainable improvement of the situation. The company thus chose T.A. Cook as an implementation consultancy specialising in Operational Excellence to analyse the key areas that need to be addressed.
Task
The task assigned to T.A. Cook was to analyse processes, procedures and patterns of behaviour within bottling and maintenance as well as all related core processes. Existing improvement potential had to be evaluated in detail in order to define key areas and concrete implementable solutions that would provide measurable increases in bottling performance. The goal was to reduce production costs per hectolitre by c. 10% and to boost competitiveness.
A major focus was the analysis of technical and organisational factors that negatively impacted performance at selected plants in the areas of bottling, operational processes in maintenance as well as cooperation between maintenance and bottling.
Approach
Over a period of three weeks, T.A. Cook conducted 20 interviews and 25 studies. Detailed analyses of machinery, staff and groups of employees during daily operations revealed weaknesses in processes. In addition, 'brown paper' or process mapping identified further areas of potential improvement. In-depth, data sup-ported analyses of performance killers exposed the reasons for the downturn in value creation at the plants and revealed possibilities to optimise set-up, cleaning, changeover as well as start up and shut down at the plants.
Within the framework of the analysis, T.A. Cook determined the optimisation potential for the following key areas:
• Impact of short-term changes to weekly plans / bottling plans on maintenance planning, execution and scheduling
• Extent of definition, organisation and internalisation of standard processes in set-up, start-up, operations
• Identification and quantification of 'non value-added' times (idle times) in the processes of production planning, maintenance and bottling
• Identification of technical and organisational performance killers and their causes
• Type and scope of applied systems to handle sources of disruption / performance killers on the basis of weakness analyses, FMEA, Pareto analyses etc.
• Impact on overall results through supporting processes such as the allocation, provision and disposal of materials (returned empties), equipment, spare parts
• Redundant interfaces, overlapping areas of responsibility, narrow spans of control e.g. in the organisational structures
• Management behaviour in their areas of responsibility and towards employees
Client benefits
In conclusion, T.A. Cook evaluated the detected performance killers and optimisation potential, calculating an improvement potential of between 9% and 15% in delivery levels at each plant.
Because the problems in bottling and maintenance are complex and interdependent, T.A. Cook worked out suitable fields of action and practical measures to leverage the existing improvement potential.
For the areas of Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE), process optimisation and organisational structures as well as management and control, T.A. Cook defined concrete implementation steps together with a time line for implementation.
By systematically implementing all measures the performance of each plant can be increased and costs per bottled hectolitre reduced sustainably. The client will then be able to further expand their market position.
For more information contact:
Rupert Clark
Marketing Manager
Direct: +44 (0) 1183 260 229
Mobile: +44 (0) 7792 926 696
r.clark@tacook.com |
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