Production optimization at food manufacturer

Client Needs

• Address the challenge of scaling production to meet rising demand.
• Ensure consistent product quality during rapid expansion, preventing increased rework.
• Implement and optimize essential production and quality metrics, including Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
• Embed production & quality standards, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement as core practices within the organization.

Solution

• Established scripts to pull data directly from the production equipment, sending it to an open-source time-series database which proved faster than commercial alternatives.
• Enabled real-time data extraction and measurement, providing immediate insights into production performance.
• Identified and measured elements impeding output optimization, providing a foundation for actionable improvements.
• Developed a custom Machine Learning (ML) model, leveraging the gathered data, to proactively predict and ensure product quality.
• Through these innovations, achieved a remarkable $4M increase in production output.
• Utilized EC2 instances for real-time analysis and tailored ML models to further enhance and maintain operational efficiency.

This approach not only enhanced production capacity but, with the integration of the custom dashboard, also facilitated the rapid generation of operational insights. These insights informed business process alterations, consistently boosting machine availability and daily production in under six months.

Results

• Boosted machine availability by 24%, resulting in an annualized benefit of $1.35M.
• Achieved a sustained daily production increase of 32%, yielding an annualized value of $2.67M.
• Identified a roadmap for potential savings via reduced product giveaway, amounting to up to $5.74M annualized.

Client Profile

• A Natural and Functional food manufacturer located in the Pacific North West.
• A publicly traded company on the NYSE with a market cap of $300M.
• Specializes in the production of powdered and liquid creamers as well as hydration products.