Releasing capacity at a critical production bottleneck.

A specialist engineering and manufacturing business was struggling to keep pace with demand at a critical production work centre. The constraint was driving overtime and the use of an evening shift, but even with the additional hours, throughput was not sufficient to get ahead of the backlog.

The process combined several activities around one machine: bringing parts forward, loading, processing, minor repairs and offloading. The challenge was to increase the amount of productive work moving through the machine without simply extending operating hours or adding permanent headcount.

The work began on the shop floor. Time was spent observing the process from end to end, speaking with the people who operated and managed it, and recording timings and output. Historical production information from both shifts was reviewed to establish a realistic baseline and understand how the work centre was performing under normal operating conditions.

The review looked beyond the machine cycle itself. It considered the time spent moving parts into position, loading and unloading, minor repairs and preparing work for the next operation. It also took account of the fact that the evening team could be diverted to short-notice orders or issues elsewhere, so differences in shift output needed to be understood in context.

Seven operating scenarios were assessed, covering different batch sizes, part lengths and team configurations. The trials compared a two-person approach with options that used four people to keep material moving continuously through the work centre.

Each scenario was assessed on a consistent basis, using the available time in a shift and an agreed efficiency assumption. Minor repairs were separated from the machine cycle for the comparison so that the true productive capacity of the equipment could be understood. The analysis showed that a significant amount of capacity could be released by changing the sequence of work, rather than relying on additional shifts or simply putting more people around the machine.

The key finding was that the machine was being used for work that did not need to take place there. Minor repairs were being carried out at the machine, taking time away from the core processing activity. In addition, scrap parts were entering the process and consuming machine time despite having no productive value.

This meant the constraint was not just the machine's cycle time. The sequence of work was restricting the amount of useful output it could deliver. Moving minor repairs to an earlier stage and keeping scrap out of the machine process would allow the equipment to concentrate on suitable parts that were ready to be processed. The review also highlighted the importance of keeping the work centre supplied and considering the physical demands of handling longer and heavier items.

• Minor repairs were moved away from the machine and completed before parts entered the process.
• Scrap parts were stopped from entering the machine, eliminating time spent processing items that could not become saleable output.
• The machine was refocused on its core processing activity, with suitable parts arriving ready for the operation.
• The evening shift was removed, with the work reorganised around a day-shift operating model.

These were practical changes to the sequence and organisation of the work, rather than a capital investment or an increase in the number of shifts.