Jack Mans, a 45 year packaging industry veteran and contributor to Packaging Digest, wrote a piece laying out the case for slowing packaging lines down to increase output on a consistent basis. The Faster I Go the Behinder I Get – back when I was a project engineer at Kraft Foods (as it was known [...]

Mike Earling (VP, Sales ) and I will be presenting a workshop on maximizing throughput at the Healthcare Packaging Conference in Princeton, NJ. We’ll be talking about how to use the theory of constraints to maximize your packaging line’s throughput and get the most out of your company’s investment. It’s on Thursday, May 26th. Click [...]

Update: I recently made some changes to this article. Most assumed that I was in favor of always slowing down to increase throughput, but it’s actually only advisable if you can increase efficiency by a significant amount (10-20%). All the changes are in the last paragraph. Can you increase efficiency and throughput by slowing down? [...]

Getting the best performance out of an automated packaging line is a difficult task. It is made up of a series of independent machines that each perform a different function such as filling, labeling, packing, etc. The machines are linked together by an overall control system that records the states of each machine (ie. waiting, [...]