When Asia Pacific food and beverage manufacturers struggle to fulfill customer orders on time, they often consider investing in increasing capacity, without analysing what actually keeps their products from reaching customers properly in the first place.
Problems can result from something as simple as a job station, machine testing, or even a supplier. Sometimes the planning, finance systems, warehouses or customers are the things affecting production and delivery.
In order to understand what needs to be fixed, manufacturers need to identify their bottlenecks and manage them. In this article we’ll provide five ways to help food and beverage manufacturers to find and then fix their bottlenecks.
1. Identify the causes
A balanced process makes it easier to identify bottlenecks. When everything is properly allocated and running at maximum efficiency, output is high. When one part of that process is compromised, the impact will be immediately felt.
Many bottlenecks have similar root causes, such as staff underperformance, problems with a machine, supply chain issues, poor ingredients planning, or poor ergonomics or machine layout on the factory floor.
To find out what’s causing inefficiencies in their system, operations managers need to start by evaluating existing production metrics, because identifying the symptoms will help to find the underlying issue.
Solving for a specific bottleneck can quickly reveal and fix others. One machine may cause disruption to several steps of a manufacturing process. Multiple staff members might be affected by a single management issue. If the root causes are addressed, the process needs to be checked again to see where any efficiencies have been gained. The same data that identifies where the problem is will also aid in identifying the cause of future bottlenecks and know what needs to be done to solve them.
As manufacturing and its associated processes evolve, bottlenecks can appear, or move to a different part of the process. Manufacturers may have designed their business not to have any, but each time they add new people, functionality, hardware, recipes, ingredients, capacity or producers, a potential issue may be introduced.
2. Measure and track performance
Business management author and renowned expert, Peter Drucker once said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” It is certainly true that the lean manufacturing principle of continuous process improvement relies on having good data and knowing what to do with it.
So, the first step is to collect relevant data and then review the key performance indicators, including acceptable tolerances for throughput, capacity, wait time and quality. Next, the data from the ERP needs to be applied to measure against the KPIs and finally where the process has been found to be underperforming, they need to deep dive to find out why.
Food and beverage manufacturers that map supply networks are better prepared. They have greater visibility into the flow and structure of their process and potential risk areas. Combining with real-time data analysis and reporting enables them to see exactly what’s working on the shop floor and what is not, so informed decisions can be made about what to do next. It is important to automate the data collection, because relying on human labour for good data will derail the back-office analytics.
3. Involve the team
Lean manufacturing incorporates a wonderful Japanese concept, ‘Genichi Genbutsu’, which literally means ‘real location, real thing’. In a factory environment, it means ‘go and see for yourself’. It exists to encourage managers to leave their offices and physically get onto the factory floor to identify and solve problems where they happen.
Having systems in place to make sure employees have everything they need to do their job will greatly reduce bottlenecks and improve overall productivity. Where symptoms of a bottleneck exist, employees on the factory floor need to be empowered to report them.
4. Simplify
A big piece of advice is not to overcomplicate it, as many bottlenecks have simple solutions. Before taking apart the entire production process, manufacturers need to look for the most obvious cause and work forward from there.
Automation will help to do this with as little downtime as possible, as when everything is connected, gaps are visible right away and can be addressed quickly.
A common solution is to join machines with conveyor belts or even move the machines alongside each other, eliminating multiple handling of products and alleviating supply into or out of the bottleneck.
5. Automate to be ready for Industry 4.0
Digitalisation is designed to automate many common processes. Whilst having many connected devices makes it easier to identify faults, Artificial Intelligence can now solve a problem before it even happens.
Existing bottlenecks may simply disappear with the implementation of a great ERP system. If there is a blockage, an ERP system will find it. If there are ways to improve efficiencies, an ERP will reveal them. Every piece of data collected provides even greater insight into the way a factory is operating.
Food and beverage manufacturers across the Asia Pacific region face the challenge of providing a wide range of products that must be safe to consume. With short expiry times, tight timelines, and a need to be cost competitive, even relatively minor bottlenecks can have a significant impact on productivity and profitability and therefore they need to be quickly found and then fixed.
Rob Stummer is SYSPRO Asia Pacific CEO.
