One of the greatest sources of downtime in food processing is the time it takes to setup for the next production run.  A proven technique to help you reduce Setup Time is the Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) developed by Shigeo Shingo a top Toyota Consultant. Shingo was able to reduce the setup time of a 1000ton press from 4 hours to 3 minutes, a major breakthrough for Toyota.  SMED is also known as Quick Changeover, Startup and Changeover Reduction

By David McGiverin

Spaghetti Diagrams help reveal opportunities to reduce or eliminate the steps and time associated with certain activities such as movement of materials or information.  It's amazing the number of excess steps it takes to accomplish a particular activity in our day-to-day lives at home or at work. This technique is extremely useful when watching people in a plant perform activities within their scope of work, or tracking the movement of product.  By tracing and analyzing their steps you will discover potential improvements that will help employees work “smarter” and accomplish more in less time.

The Theory of Constraints (ToC) is a way to avoid sub-optimizing a local process at the expense of the whole operation.  The idea is based on two simple facts:
 

1. All processes have one weakest link in the chain: a bottleneck. This bottleneck limits the flow of the whole operation.
 
2. Other activities (both in that process and other parts of a plant) have excess capacity when compared to that weakest link and therefore waste resource and time that could be applied to fix the weakest link.
 
3. Once you fix that particular constraint, your overall flow will improve – however, another weakest link will then emerge.
  

By a continuous process of finding the bottleneck, balancing flows, and eliminating excess production throughout a plant the whole operation can be maximized in its productivity.

By Ronak Shah

This is the second of two articles introducing the Theory of Constraints as a production management framework and describing the experience of a local natural food company in implementing the Theory to improve operational performance.  In the first article we introduced the Theory of Constraints and its applicability to some companies in the food processing industry.