When a plant runs hundreds of SKUs across multiple lines—with differing capabilities, regulatory requirements, and ingredient constraints—scheduling is incredibly complex.
A Midwest food and beverage facility in this position faced a corporate demand to increase production. Performance at the plant had dropped; it couldn’t reliably meet existing targets, let alone grow. They needed a smarter, faster way to plan production, without increasing risk or compromising service.
Integrated Project Management Company, Inc. (IPM) partnered with the team to transform their approach, integrating manufacturing expertise and a data-informed scheduling solution to deliver immediate results and set the stage for sustainable growth.
The manufacturing facility had already gone through SKU rationalization yet still produces a complex mix of almost 1,000 SKUs. Finished products include a variety of flavors, colors, and sizes, and many contain allergens. The 11 lines have varying capabilities, capacity, and speeds. Complicating the effort, they needed to dedicate lines to ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook items, due to their different regulatory requirements.
Manual processes made it difficult to schedule production. The plant couldn’t respond quickly to missing raw materials or customer demands that caused break-ins and delayed orders. It consistently fell short of its production goals and OTIF (on-time, in-full) delivery targets.
Because of all the problems, planners had been trying to fix the most urgent problem of the day. This often just created another problem for later: for example, schedule changes, delivery delays, and cutting production for restock inventory.
Management hoped to improve cost/pound performance in the short term by using resources effectively. Long term, they wanted to increase volume. They were scheduling 1.1 million pounds, which the plant rarely accomplished, and wanted to increase output by 18 percent. But neither the company nor the plant was confident they could deliver.
The team needed a better way to plan and execute.
IPM brought rigor and cross-functional collaboration to address the problems. Working closely with plant personnel, IPM mapped out the current scheduling and production processes. Next, they analyzed timing for tasks like start-up, shutdown, and allergen cleanouts, and studied historical break-ins and other downtime.
The implementation of an advanced production scheduling system was central to the solution. IPM led the configuration of the system, including building product wheels based on sequencing logic like ingredient compatibility, allergen status, changeover complexity, and customer priorities.
IPM worked with management, production, maintenance, and IT to incorporate their requirements. They hit a snag because the company didn’t have effective master data governance and information was missing. So, IPM helped develop interim processes for manually entering new-product data, such as allergen use and resulting sanitation needs, and proposed long-term solutions.
IPM led the team through testing and training. Together, they ran real and theoretical schedules through the system to demonstrate what could improve. Besides separating ready-to-eat items, they focused on the most complex changeovers. If they could reduce the number of changeovers, they could significantly reduce downtime overall.
Testing what-if scenarios helped build confidence of both planners and management.
With the new scheduling system in place, the plant gained immediate benefits. Changeover hours per 100,000 pounds produced dropped by 25 percent, largely by sequencing products to reduce allergen-related downtime. OTIF performance increased by 5 percentage points within weeks of going live, thanks to improved visibility and better scheduling decisions. And regulatory risk was reduced by fully separating ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook production lines. Schedulers no longer had to be careful about which type of product was running on which line.
Importantly, the team proved the plant could hit the 1.3 million pound production target. By modeling and then piloting the right combination of lines, staffing, and scheduling rules, the plant showed corporate it could deliver more with fewer resources.
Even without broader process improvements, the facility improved performance and cost per pound, opening the door to greater efficiency and scalability in the future. And because more efficient scheduling was cut by a full day per week, planners have time to optimize for those changes.
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