Pharmaceutical 

One of our larger medical accounts did.

The time of the planned stops for changeovers varied a lot and caused a lot of frustration. But where was the real issue? Machinery? Wrong processes? Or something else? This spurred the Maintenance Coordinator of the production site to create a more accurate dataset on what actually was happening during these stops.

In collaboration with Blackbird, the “Split-Stop” functionality was created. During one changeover stop, many separate activities were taking place. Clearance of the line, cleaning of the line and then, of course, the New-Batch start up preparation. By focusing on the most time-consuming phase, this part of the phase can now be split into additional stops and you will be able to allocate the areas to improve; it being machinery, training, processes or any other issue delaying the changeover.

As this production site is rather large and is equipped with machinery purchased from different suppliers from different years, the next steps could be to compare the lines and their changeover performance. Meanwhile at this point, we are still collecting data on this story, but already now the employees attending to the machinery, have seen the benefits of using this specific function, and it is in fact improving their day too.