Track: Manufacturing

Abstract

Manufacturing companies face many challenges when trying to meet the market and their clients’ demands. Building and operating highly automated lines is not a straightforward task, especially when the bottle format is unique, and the line is being built from the ground up to accommodate the new format. In this study, downtime data and Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) analysis was used to determine the effectiveness of a newly built mayonnaise bottling line during the ramp-up period and the main reasons behind low OEE, a lengthy ramp-up period, and high downtime. Two pieces of machinery were the most significant contributors to downtime, a newly bought labeler, whose factory acceptance test (FAT) was never performed, and an old, repurposed drop packer, that was previously being used for a much larger packaging format. It was found that the two machines had the same MTTF (mean time to failure) value. A model was built to predict the likelihood of attainment loss using a Monte Carlo simulation after performing a goodness of fit analysis on the time-to-failure (TTF) and time-to-repair (TTR) data available. From this model, the availability of the line was determined, and the effect of the two equipment was shown to be strong on the overall performance of the line.