Increasing Capacity: Specialist Adhesive

Increased capacity of a specialist adhesive product by 22% in 9 months

Industry

Industrial By-Product Processing – Specialist Adhesive

Objective

• Increase adhesive production capacity by 15% across 4 lines 

Project Length

9 months, 2.5 consultants

Results

• 18-day high capacity trial demonstrated capacity increase of 22% above baseline
• Capacity increase enabled projected demand increase for next 2 years to be met, delaying requirement for CapEx
• Reduction in waste caused by changeovers worth €700k per year

Why was Chartwell brought on board?

The business was launching a series of new products, which coupled with existing growth would cause the plant to become production constrained in the next 2 years.

To avoid committing to expensive CapEx that might not be needed in 2 years' time, the site team called in Chartwell to understand how much additional capacity could be obtained from the existing lines without CapEx.

Key Workstreams

Solving technical problems limiting line speed

• Some of the process steps were limited by increasing prevalence of certain types of quality failures as line speed was increased
• Working together with process experts and the plant's operations team, and using a Variable Tree Modelling approach and forensic examination of quality failures, the team built a model of the parameters controlling product quality at each stage. 
• By implementing process changes and a new, faster sampling process, the team were able to resolve the quality issues and increase line speed by 25% at this asset
• Taking a similar approach to a second process enabled the team to challenge temperature settings during the reaction step - resulting in a >25% speed increase across 2 lines.

Maximising fill quantity

• Reviewing fill levels of key assets across all four lines, the team found an opportunity to safely increase the volume of product in certain assets - resulting in a 4% increase in overall throughput

High capacity trials

• Due to unforeseeable external issues, the team were not able to run the line at maximum speed throughout the project.
• To demonstrate increased capacity, the team pulled together all of the process learnings and ran an 18-day high capacity trial - demonstrating that a 22% increase in capacity vs baseline could be sustained for an extended period.