Standardizing across multiple locations to reach peak performance

A packaging and containers manufacturer with multiple factories spread across the United States was looking for a solution that could help the whole team, no matter their location or role, get high-quality product out the door on-time to meet and exceed customer expectations.

With Guidewheel’s plug-and-play FactoryOps platform, they were able to quickly and easily clip on sensor and get the “ground truth” status of every machine in real-time across their assets. This visibility opened up opportunities to dramatically improve throughput and profitability, all without spending millions of dollars or stopping production for weeks to implement complicated technology. 

The challenge

Managing across multiple sites and shifts presented a constant challenge for the leadership team without accurate and real-time visibility into their operations. Their teams were doing their best to quickly identify and escalate issues, but were reliant on text, phone, and email. Each site operated and reported on downtime and other issues in silos, making it hard to share best practices. 

Furthermore, 90% of the time they were only able to identify issues after the fact, once it was already too late. This meant the team was stuck in firefighting mode: constantly reacting to problems, unable to identify and address root causes. Lastly, finding the right talent had become a challenge, putting even more burden on their already crunched team.

Their leaders had a strong instinct they were operating under their true capacity, and could be getting more from their team and machines. They had looked for years for a solution to provide them with the visibility and workflows to support operational excellence, but the solutions they explored had all been “nightmare projects,” with high upfront cost of time, money, and no guarantee they would be easily used across the full team. When they learned about Guidewheel, they were intrigued by the plug-and-play model and ability to ramp up quickly across all their sites.

First steps to real-time visibility
The leadership team worked with Guidewheel to create a swift implementation plan matched to each facility's busy schedule. Each site clipped in their key machines (starting with >100 machines across 8+ sites across the US), and they quickly gained a single source of truth across every asset.

When the first cohort of plants went live and the Plant Managers could see their actual runtime and granular machine activity, they were, in their own words: “flabbergasted.” They knew lost production time was a problem, but they had no idea their downtime was so high. They quickly realized there was an opportunity to dramatically improve their efficiency, throughput, and margin. 

Next steps to daily operational excellence

In addition to having the visibility to spot this opportunity, Guidewheel’s guided workflows has also allowed them to weave the steps to operational excellence into their everyday routine, improving performance without adding burden.

Daily, each site’s Plant Manager logs in, reviews runtime, confirms or tags all causes of downtime, and assigns actions. The Plant Manager also gets a personalized weekly report that helps him or her understand runtime over the last week, shows progress on key goals, and highlights the top offender (main cause of downtime within the plant). Monthly, each plant’s team uses a personalized monthly report to review trends, compare week over week, and identify key areas to further improve.

Across multiple facilities, the shared visibility creates healthy competition and also allows the different sites to share best practices.

What’s the result?
They are on track to achieve operational excellence by building internal controls that solve the downtime causes at the root. Monday mornings meetings are more productive, because they can use the Weekly Snapshot from Guidewheel to guide the conversation and focus on driving results that week. The team has gone from relying on anecdotes to having a shared source of truth and good data to make decisions. They no longer depend on others to trickle down the information because now it’s available in real-time for everyone who needs it.  They have standardized reports that allow for easy comparison between factories, know main causes of downtime (and how much each cause costs them!), and where to prioritize for highest return. 

Together, their full team has now gone from constantly firefighting to being on the fast track to peak performance.