Manufacturing Case Study: Reduced Downtime Saved $500,000 in One Year

Downtime in manufacturing means dollars lost. The longer and more frequent the downtime, the less product is shipped, and the more resources are lost to waste. For some critical processes, improving downtime, planned or unplanned, can mean millions of dollars saved across the enterprise.

Inconsistent Downtime Lowers Productivity

An Acadia customer is a consumer durable goods manufacturer with plants operating around the globe. As part of their manufacturing process, certain production lines enter periods of planned downtime to replenish stock or reconfigure for different products. This happens as many as 20-30 times per day at each of their facilities. At one of their largest facilities, it happens up to 60 times per day.

Operations leaders understand shaving even a few minutes off downtime can generate significant savings. But achieving meaningful, sustained downtime improvement was difficult. The challenge stemmed from a lack of consistency: the company had a standard, but most employees hadn’t been trained to it. Instead, they’d been trained by a colleague who shared their own best practices.

With a complex process and frequent operator turnover, the team needed a better way to ensure the process was executed accurately each time.

A Repeatable Process in Acadia Drives Success

A continuous improvement manager at one facility replaced traditional shoulder-to-shoulder training with a more consistent and repeatable process in Acadia. Each team member was required to read and acknowledge the proper preparation and execution of the procedure. Then, they were quizzed on the information. Finally, they were observed and formally evaluated while executing the procedure live.

All activities were tracked in Acadia to identify team members who needed additional support. Employee feedback captured during training identified those aspects of the process that needed reform.

After the training period, employees were still required to follow a digital SOP to complete critical tasks. The SOP provided all the resources the team needed to guide them through the process, making sure no step was missed or forgotten. It also tracked compliance, so managers could focus coaching efforts where they were most needed.

So, What Are Eight Minutes Worth?

Including training time, the line was fully up and running on the standard process within two weeks. And in that same short period of time, they saw a 19% improvement in their planned downtime metric.

After six months, they improved downtime from 15 minutes to seven. In the first year, the continuous improvement leader calculated this one simple project had saved the company $500k. When implemented across all plants producing the same products, the savings will be in the millions.

Outcomes:

• $500k cash savings due to process change that led to decrease in error rate, rework, and planned downtime at a single facility
• 19% downtime improvement in two weeks
• Reduced time-to-proficiency for new hires and existing employees
• Higher retention rate of new skills among those trained using the new method

Find out how can Acadia help your business.