European refrigerated food companies must be highly efficient under a very competitive environment. That is the case for one of the leading conglomerates based on Spain. After an unfortunate event where the group´s largest sausage production plant was unable to continue working, the company adopted a sense of urgency to achieve customer demand increasing the efficiency of the rest of its production network by 25-30%.
The current study has the purpose of describing the experience of applying the concept of Operational Equipment Effectiveness in a spanish frankfurter plant. This approach is imbedded in a Theory of Constraints scheme that insures a positive contribution to the objective of increasing productivity with each initiative implemented.
After an exhaustive analysis of the actual plant´s efficiency level, it was found that the best areas for improvement referred to its degree of availability for production. The main goal was set to reduce downtime by 15% in all the franks production lines, starting with the three worst production lines. Considering OEE approach; the first step to do was to identify the percentage of manufacturing time that was truly productive for each line. As a result, percentages for quality, performance and availability were known; as well as their main problems. The most popular areas of opportunity are the following: set-up times, excessive non-stop working hours and corrective maintenance interventions.
What must be done was clear, focus on increasing production by reducing downtime occurrences per week, as well as set-up times and frequency. The most important question was “how?”, and clearly OEE was going to be the main player, after having the results for each line, bottle necks were defined and problem solving began. Here is where concepts as 5´s, SMED, preventive and autonomous maintenance started making sense while being applied to each of the lines. The results were exceeded, the pilot test was fully done in one of the lines selected and the time reduction resulted in 15 hours a week, which taken into franks, is equivalent to 17 tons per week.