1. Author or Company YOUR LOGOwww.mysiteflo.com
5
Single-ShiftContinuous-ImprovementProjects
2. Contents
2
5 Lines Don’t Deserve Unscheduled Downtime
Unscheduled downtime happens fast and understanding why
is challenging, given your installed base
Tackle the Tape Head
1 Addressing one of the single largest sources of down time
and rework in a packaging operation
Total Recall
2 Addressing the inevitable recall and improving how you
monitor conditions after a recall throughout your supply chain
One Shift Outperforms, One Needs Reformed
3 Monitoring and changing behavior to get consistent
performance from shift to shift
4 Who’s the Boss? Supervisors
They have a significant impact on your operation, but they
have very little insight into employees work, and they aren’t
notified about issues in real-time
3. 3
Introduction
You know what you want in a continuous improvement
project. Something affordable within your operating budget
like a low complexity, high return project that can be
monitored in real-time, focusing on the most painful, costly
elements of your operation.
Now isn’t the time for another speculative, costly
venture that requires capital budget, weeks of training time,
and expensive installations that consume critical human and
financial resources.
Wanting to pick the low hanging, high return fruit is
such a familiar story that we’ve designed our company to
respond to it, as our customers focus on completing single-
shift continuous-improvement projects (SSCI).
At SITEFLO, we’ve simply become enablers, and
believe strongly that when it comes to continuous
improvement projects, you should be able to just do it.
To that end, we want to share five single-shift
continuous-improvement projects (SSCI) we’ve completed
with our customers that you can start next week to increase
your bottom line in a single shift, many of whom have
deployed our semi-automated web and mobile-based
solution to help. These are all projects you can start next
week.
On behalf of our team, I hope this helps on your
continuous improvement journey. Don’t hesitate to reach out
if you think we can help. Let’s make continuous improvement
effortless in 2015 with SSCI.
Brent MacDonald
CEO of Xiplinx (developers of SITEFLO)
!
4. 4
Tackle the Tape Head
Problem: You’re running efficiently upstream, and your tape or tape
head fails you again. You know what’s next. Rework while your team has to
manually tape boxes, product spilling off the line, and costly downtime while
you fix the head and reinstall the tape. Hopefully you can fix the problem
yourself. It’s more likely that you need to call in additional help.
Solution: Clearly document the performance of your tape head. Mobile
devices can be configured to help you track and share project data in real-
time. Configure the mobile device to track metrics like:
• Case throughput rate
• Number of cases run
• Quantity of incorrectly taped cases
• Reasons for downtime
• Time to correct rework
Tape head issues cause
significant downtime in
your operation and they
are a major source of
frustration for your
operations personnel.
It’s worth documenting
the existing performance
of your tape and tape-
head because there are
other solutions that you
can trial head to head
with your existing
technology. Typically on
a tape head trial, you
can see a difference
within a shift.
1 Addressing one of the single largest sources of down time
and rework in a packaging operation
5. 5
Total Recall
Problem: A product’s been recalled. There are
multiple organizations throughout your supply chain
affected. Your suppliers are good business partners and
your recall teams are all monitoring whether or not you’re
compliant with government requirements, which means
you’re all concerned with whether or not the right data is
being collected during the right intervals. Your approach to
monitoring is paper based, too slow, and it just doesn’t
work. Biological, chemical, and physical data has to be
collected for a defined period of time.
Solution: Digitally record and share the data you’re
required to track during the recall period. You and your
suppliers are subject to strict requirements, but it’s clear
what you have to track, when you have to track it, and
why. By recording this information digitally, you can
socialize it in real-time on a web enabled dashboard for
visibility by all parties concerned, and you can also be
alerted when critical values fall outside of the acceptable
parameters. Configure a mobile device to track
information like:
• Investigative swab test results
• Routine and investigative finished product test results
• Routine and required microbial testing results on
environment and finished product
• Sanitation rapid method swabs and total plate count
results
• Allergen testing and test results on environment and
finished product
5
Other reasons to do it: Using mobile devices can
get you efficient access to information, can make
the data shareable immediately with regulators,
employees, and suppliers, and can provide a good
example of how the technology can be leveraged
in your operation daily to spot possible issues that
lead to recalls in advance. Devices can be
tethered, or secured in another fashion to suit the
requirements of your operation, and industrial
grade cases can protect devices against wear.
Mobile device monitoring software can also be
leveraged to keep track of where and when the
device is being used.
2 Addressing the inevitable recall and improving how you
monitor conditions after a recall throughout your supply chain
• Cleaning chemical and sanitizer chemical
concentration level
• Hot water temperature
• Verification sheets for preoperational visual checks,
mid-shift clean up, and labels
• Verification sheets for metal detector, x-ray, rare earth
magnet, and sifter screens
• Overall monitoring of employees carrying out critical
activities
6. 6
You’ve got a sea of intelligence that you can’t
access, typically buried in paper forms that
employees fill out, or, not accessible at all because
you’re not tracking key employee activities. Getting
the most critical data into a digital format and
sharing it throughout your organization can bring
insight you don’t currently have today.
Problem: The day shift outperforms the night shift for a month, and the night shift outperforms
the day shift next month. It doesn’t make any sense. You know how much downtime they both create,
but you’ve got no good information on root causes, or on group or individual employee performance.
Solution: Enable better behavior with respect to the most critical activities on your line by
providing employees with mobile aides. This gives you the ability to date and time stamp employee
actions, gives employees access to operating procedures and steps to complete work electronically,
and, provides management personnel with real-time data and alerts on employee activities.
One Shift Outperforms, One Needs Reformed
3 Monitoring and changing behavior to get consistent performance
from shift to shift
This enables shift comparisons, and provides you with the data
required to complete root cause analysis on critical issues.
Consider configuring a mobile device to track the following
activities:
• Operator presence and consumable materials availability
• Preoperational checklist
• SKU matches the production schedule SKU
• Downtime reasons
• Sanitation procedures
• Rework required
• Maintenance activity
• Monitoring of any other other values required in real-time
relating to plant performance
7. 7
Problem: It’s the end of the day, and your
supervisors have been troubleshooting for most
of it. The unscheduled down time didn’t help.
They’re back at their desk, with a stack of
paperwork sitting in front of them, most of which
will be reviewed at the end of the week if it gets
keyed into a spreadsheet. Even after a quick
review, they’ve discovered three other critical
issues they missed that they could have
responded to immediately if they were notified.
4 Who’s the Boss? Supervisors
They have a significant impact on your operation, but have
very little insight into employees work, and they aren’t notified
about issues in real-time
Solution: Provide supervisors with an
aggregated, dashboard view of the critical
activities completed by employees that are
required for supervisor review, including
ways in which employees deal with
problems and alerts that they encounter.
Leverage alert functionality so that
supervisors get text messages and emails
when employees enter data that is outside
of normal circumstances. With the right
technology, supervisors can simply scroll
through a list of logged data and events,
received in real-time and categorized by
user and activity after a quick review of a
real-time dashboard. Make it possible to
interact with each event and to provide
comments or notes on corrective actions.
Reports can be printed with ease, providing
a complete picture of your operation and a
powerful trail of intelligence for data mining.
8. 8
5 Lines Don’t Deserve Unscheduled Downtime
Unscheduled downtime happens fast and understanding why
is challenging, given your installed base
Problem: It’s the end of the week and you’re finally getting around to reviewing reports, only to find
out that there was significant downtime on a line and you don’t know why. You’ve got three different
teams in your operation pointing the finger, but it gives you no insight into what happened or how
long you were down.. All you have is a paper note with a few thoughts on why, and the writing is
barely legible.
Solution: Track downtime either in real-time, or immediately after following an event using mobile
devices. You don’t always have the luxury of a sensor logging an unscheduled event for you and the
downtime data collection process is typically second to getting your line back up. So, the process
has to be as simple and streamlined as possible. Consider logging when the line stopped and when
it started again, how much rework was completed, whether or not production was affected, and
other critical values.
9. 9
At SITEFLO, we employ a proprietary value mapping process before we take on a single-shift continuous-
improvement (SSCI) project. It's an important part of the work we do with our customers, and helps SITEFLO
and our partners define success criteria, as well as uncover opportunities where our products and services can
create the most value.
You should start a similar process to select the most appropriate single-shift continuous-improvement project
(SSCI). Through our work, we’ve developed a compendium of question based opportunities for investigation in
your environment, that you can likely leverage in your operation.
Below is a sample of some of the questions our field based sales representatives are asking. We’ve got more
than this to share, but consider some of your answers to these questions, and the intelligence you could
possess with the answers:
Getting Started
1. What are your human-machine-interfaces (HMI’s),
manufacturing execution (MES), and ERP systems not telling
you? Could you deploy a simple product to collect more data to
learn more?
2. How is your labor force performing? Is one shift operating more
effectively than another? Could you compare their performance if
you had a product to measure the activities they do day-to-day,
or on specific projects?
3. What additional value can you draw from the data you have to
collect day to day to meet compliance and other regulatory
requirements? If your start to collect it digitally, could you
uncover anything interesting?
By sharing lessons learned and contributing to our community, we think we can ultimately improve the way
we manufacture.
Please reach out and keep the single shift continuous improvement discussion going with us at
www.mysiteflo.com, or reach out directly by email info@xiplinx.com.
More continuous improvement e-books, case studies, audio and video content to come in 2015!
4. How often are your systems (like conveyors) operating without product consistently flowing through?
Where are the bottlenecks? Where could more data help you identify efficiencies?
5. Are you a form-based operation, burying intelligence in stacks of paper filled out by technical
personnel, only to have to enter this into an electronic database?
6. Do you have well trained technical personnel, and are you providing appropriate job aides so that
employees can do their work efficiently and effectively?
7. What alerts and alarms are you not receiving today that you wish you could receive? What control limits
matter, and how much do you understand about whether or not you’re within them when you think
about your installed base today?