Throughput, throughput, throughput. It’s the food industry’s version of “location, location, location.” If you look at the big trends in food manufacturing today — like automation, digitalization, and efficiency improvements — you’ll see that they’re ultimately ways to increase throughput. We’re not just saying this because we believe throughput is the most important metric for […]
Category Archives: Blog
Common Production Constraints, Part 2: Food Packaging Lines
In the previous article, we identified the main places bottling lines get hung up during beverage processing. Here, we look 5 common constraints along food packaging lines. Wrappers/baggers Like with beverages, in food manufacturing, moving from the processing to packaging can be challenging. For example, we worked with a client that made bagels. The line […]
Common Production Constraints, Part 1: Beverage Lines
Hopefully, you’ve read our recent articles about how much production line bottlenecks cost and how to find which piece of equipment is creating the bottleneck in your facility. (If not, take a few minutes to check them out — they’ll provide context for this next series of articles.) We’ve analyzed thousands of production lines across […]
How Much Are Production Line Bottlenecks Costing You?
$3,552,000! I know that seems like a lot. But that’s how much profit one winery was missing out on before they took steps to reduce the impact of the bottleneck on their production line. We’ve performed our Garvey Line Analysis with hundreds of companies. And, while the results vary, we typically find that companies are […]
How to Find the Constraint in Your Production Line
Do you know what the bottleneck is in your manufacturing process? The limiting factor that’s keeping you from ramping up your production or sometimes even meeting your goals? This bottleneck is your constraint, and it should be your top priority because it’s setting the pace for the rest of your line. Until you increase the […]
What Is Throughput? (And Why You Should Care)
Throughput is the #1 metric for assessing the quality of your production line. Not just an important metric, but the most important metric. In business-bottom-line terms, throughput is the difference between: Meeting your production goals and missing your targets Having a competitive advantage and falling behind Keeping your customers and losing them to someone who […]
Maximizing Thruput: Choose Your Constraint
Most people’s approach to increasing production is to “identify ” the constraint. I believe there is a better approach. My approach is to look at the process and decide “where” you want the constraint. Once you shift your perspective to this method, your approach becomes proactive as opposed to a reactive. In a proactive approach, […]
Maximizing Thruput: The Myth of Efficiency
Efficiency improvement feels like a good thing. I mean it makes sense, doesn’t it? If we can make something more efficient, it stands to reason that it should improve the process. Not always. I propose that in most cases increases in efficiency will be of little benefit, if any, to the overall process. In fact, […]
Maximizing Thruput: Perspective and Airplanes
How would you like to have all your machines run at 100% efficiency? It would be great, would it not? However, how would like to be responsible for making all of your machines run at 100% efficiency? You see, machines just don’t run at 100%. Airplanes, for example, with all their redundant backup systems still […]
Maximizing Thruput: Buffers!
The reason we put buffers into a system is to protect the constraint from the malfunctions of other machines. The last thing we want to do is to add downtime to the system caused by the buffers. That would defeat their whole purpose and render them useless. Buffers should be extremely simple in design principle. […]