Increasing Productivity and Yield: Sausage Production

Increasing productivity by >20% and reducing waste by >20% in 6 months

Industry

Food and Beverage - Meat Processing

Project Length

6 months - 3 consultants

Objectives

• Improve labour productivity
• Reduce waste in production and packaging areas 

Results

• Increased productivity by >20%
• Reduced waste in target areas by >20%

Why was Chartwell brought on board?

Increasingly competitive market conditions meant the site management team were looking for ways to reduce costs. 

Labour and raw materials presented the two largest cost centres for the site, Chartwell were brought in to see how much improvement would be possible and convert this to bottom-line value

Core Project Workstreams

Reducing short stops on sausage production lines 

• The team designed and implemented short interval control cycles to highlight issues causing productivity losses each day - including ultra-short stops that were previously going unnoticed
• Technical problem solving methods were applied to the most frequent stop causes - from which best practice setups and troubleshooting methods were developed and trained out to the operator teams to improve performance in resolving stoppages

Improving clean room packaging yield

• Working together with site maintenance and operations, technical adjustments were made to the slicing machine to reduce the meat volume becoming trapped in the cutter
• SOP was developed for executing the same process for any future cutters that may be installed

Increasing sausage packaging productivity

• Developed and implemented the use of more granular plannign tools to enable greater flexibility of operators within shifts
•  Worked with the production and technical teams to solve constraints around increasing line speeds, enabling these to be increased
• Solved technical problems causing sausages to be broken and generating slicer waste

Improving clean room productivity

• Solved technical constraints preventing speed increases on automatic lines - resulting in speed uplift of 10-25% on different products 
• Changed working pattern to maximise productive hours on shift around fixed break periods 
• Improved slicer refill processes to reduce refill short stops by 5-15%

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