How to overcome Pinch Points in manufacturing

What do you do when everything is running flat out – and you’re asked whether you can make “oh, about 15-20% more”? That’s where I found myself while in a previous role. You’re not quite sure what is causing the bottleneck in production because you’re so stuck in the job, you’re not able to take a step back and look at the whole process to see what’s causing you to lose productivity.

Throughout this article I’m going to take you through an example of where the company needed to create more capacity from an operation which was seemingly running efficiently.

What was the situation?

We had a particular product that had been a very nice earner for us, but there was a prospective customer who wanted to start taking a lot of material starting in about six months’ time. Could we increase our capacity to fulfil this order? Well, if we didn’t, they knew a competitor who might.

Like a lot of our products, this one was made in multiple stages. All of them ran at different rates, in reactors or stills that were different sizes. At the time, we flagged that there might have been one asset somewhere that was restricting how much we could make overall – and if we could get more capacity out of that, the other units could pick up on it. It looked impossible, because not only were the rates and capacities of all the units different, but some of what we made had to be cleaned up before it could be processed.

Plus, the process of increasing capacity was made more complicated because some materials required more than one clean up stage before producing something we could sell. This couldn’t be avoided, but similarly we wanted to avoid wasting time in preparing the plant as we had been accustomed to doing.

Things we considered

When evaluating this issue we signposted a few thoughts and questions which, when answered, helped us to refine our needs:

• We knew how much material each batch produced, on each unit.
• We knew how long, on average, it took to do a batch.
• So we knew what the average output was per hour on each piece of equipment.
• Most importantly, we also knew how much finished product a ton of each intermediate material would make. This was mainly the province of the accountants and we rude mechanicals in production tended to ignore it. Now, it was important.
• We’d been spending a lot of time cleaning plant. Could we use that time making something to actually sell instead of boiling water and wasting steam, preparing the plant for production?
• Did we need to follow the current process, which we had been using for years, or was there another solution?

Where did we start?

A few minutes’ calculation and I could work out how much finished product one hour (or day, or week) on each asset would support. It was clear that there was a bottleneck that limited our production capacity, and it wasn’t where we’d all expected it to be.

This asset was supposed to have spare capacity. We knew that a key component on this plant had a limited life expectancy (with a mean time between failures of 70-80 days). When it failed, we ordered a replacement (which we could get after 3-4 days and fit after another day). Note that this meant the plant was sitting doing nothing for four to five days, four or five times a year – so about 20 days of down time every year. All of that was lost production, because the rest of the process would be starved of feed.

Explaining that we didn’t have spare capacity was the first problem. Then convincing my superiors that by keeping the key spares on stock we could release at least three weeks of productive time (and the output from four days production would cover the cost of all the spares for a year). Luckily when you’re running a manufacturing operation there are often other people looking at the key metrics, including the accountants who regularly measured efficiency numbers. The production team were then able to call a meeting to explain the efficiency issues with the plant, in order to help formulate the solution for the bottleneck. That gave us more than a third of the capacity we needed, right away.

Then I had to look at what other assets could do the job – we had one that was a lot less capable and was used to make a less profitable product. It was easy enough to divert it on to another process, but that left us with a shortfall somewhere else. So I had to look wider for a solution – and I asked our sister site in the USA to make the cheaper product for us. We shipped it to the UK in crude form and distilled it (using spare capacity that we’d freed up in a previous project). That gave us more spare capacity – just in time to meet our deadline for the customer.

On reflection, had each department taken a step back together to see where issues were coming from throughout the whole production line, this process may have been much easier to resolve because we would have immediately known our options. To do this, I would now recommend to any organisation having the same struggles, arrange a meeting between different departments regularly. This will help talk through any issues and share skillsets among the whole process. And remember that you are all supposed to be on the same side.