Teamwork to drive results: >50% decrease in lost production time in 2 months
Tired of speculating about what was causing their team to miss their production targets, an established plastics manufacturer with 50+ machines across multiple departments reached out to Guidewheel in search of a system that could help solve their challenges. Two months after starting to use the system, they have recorded over a 50% decrease in lost production time across critical machines. This is the story of how they did it:
The Project Manager was tasked with identifying a system that could drill down into the causes of downtime. He took responsibility for coordinating implementation and launch with the Guidewheel team. Together with the Project Manager and the Maintenance team, the Guidewheel team ran tests to accurately set machine thresholds and track machine performance. The Project Manager ensured that all relevant stakeholders were properly onboarded - first starting with the Heads of Departments, and later, their respective teams.
They wanted to track every detail affecting their performance, so they configured alerts in the Guidewheel system to prompt the team to act immediately in case of any anomalies - with alerts sending automatically in real-time, hardly anything now went unnoticed!
Prior to the Guidewheel system, manual data entry and reporting for their 50+ machines was stealing time from other important functions of the business - time that could be spent on driving and improving production outcomes. With Guidewheel, they simply uploaded their production data onto the platform ahead of the daily morning meeting drill.
In these meetings, the Head of Maintenance was responsible for reviewing performance against targets. He took initiative to drive daily improvement in reducing machine downtime. To make their progress easy for the full team to visualize, he displayed the Guidewheel platform on a monitor that all the factory floor users could access, and downloaded production and runtime charts from the Guidewheel system to bring to the meetings.
Each morning, the Head of Maintenance met with the Line Managers to assess the previous day’s performance and discuss the factors that contributed to downtime. Were their changeover times longer than planned? Was an operator delayed for some time getting the right material ready? Did they run out of raw material? How could they prevent each cause of loss from recurring? Armed with their findings, the Line Managers then went back to their respective sections and together with their teams, created and implemented strategies to minimize downtime.
In the afternoon, the daily report was sent to the CEO, who given his busy schedule, relied heavily on the Guidewheel summary reports to stay abreast of performance and inform strategic decisions. Given the importance of this report to the CEO, the Project Manager configured the timing of the report to automatically send at the best time for the CEO to review in between meetings. On the off chance that their morning process was delayed, the Project Manager would proactively adjust the report dispatch time to ensure that all their production entries were completed and verified before a report was generated.
With these daily habits, in just two months the team has already achieved over 50% reduction in lost production time across 10+ bottleneck machines, translating to an average of 2-3 hours improvement in runtime per machine. They’ve gone from speculating to knowing with certainty how to consistently achieve their goals.