Capacity and Productivity Increase: Medical Packaging

Increased capacity of medical packaging production line by >35% in 4 months

Industry

Healthcare Supplies - Medical Packaging

Project length

4 months - 1 Consultant

Objectives

• Increase throughput rate of main production processes to meet additional forecast sales
• Reduce waste to minimise reduce manufacturing costs

Why was Chartwell brought on board?

This private-equity owned business were anticipating strong sales in the coming year and wanted to ensure that they had the capacity in place to meet the additional orders

The owners and management team were also keen to reduce scrap levels, which would reduce manufacturing costs and allow for further price reductions in future to gain market share

Core Project Workstreams

Increasing Cutting Efficiency

• Working with the operators and engineering team, conducted a technical problem solving exercise which eliminated one of the leading causes of lost time and waste
• Used Chartwell's cycle time reduction methodology to reduce changeover time from 35 minutes to 17 minutes on average
• Solved technical problems which were preventing line speed from being increased
• Designed and implemented electronic data-capture systems to improve process control 

Increasing Gluing Capacity

• Used Chartwell's cycle time reduction methodology to reduce gluing changeover time from 28 minutes to 14 minutes on average
• Solved technical problems, enabling line speed to be increased by 22%
• Designed and implemented line modifications to make line operation more ergonomic and minimise lifting

• Implemented mass-balance based measuring systems to show the true value of material being scrapped
• Ran technical problem solving exercises on the leading causes of scrap, successfully reducing overall scrap levels by 24% by project end, and leaving team with a list of additional actions to reduce scrap further

Sustainable Improvement Structures

• Implemented an effective set of daily and weekly meetings for driving improvement
• Created tools for showing the total available capacity and waste opportunities, using the sites own data and handed these over to the site team
• Trained a the sites improvement champion to continue pushing forward initiatives effectively
• Created a site-specific improvement playbook to highlight which methodology had been used and how it should be deployed