Beverage

One of our customers put a Factbird on his most critical production line, which had become a bottleneck. They did not have an overview of why the line capacity was lagging, so they installed Factbird to get an overview of the causes of the line stops.

The line is running 24 hours a day and producing between 1,000 and 2,000 bottles per minute. In the past, the operators had to put stop causes into a spreadsheet, but it never worked well as it was time consuming, and many stops remained unregistered.  These problems led to a stop cause overview that was not based on facts.

It only took them a few minutes to install a Factbird on the line and to define the error categories:

• Unexpected stop
• Planned stop
• Machine error stop
• Material error stop
• Other stops

They were gathering more intelligence on day one, and within a week, it was clear that the most critical error category was Machine error stops. They enhanced the category of Machine Error Stop into 3 sub categories and started troubleshooting each of these to increase the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of the line.

Factbird's ease of use and depth of insight has inspired other line managers at the company to install Factbirds on their own lines.