Reducing time losses in operational actions of a food production lines

Most of the companies are interested in developing their production processes. With production process development, companies can meet their customers demands better. Tight competition is one reason that forces companies to use their production equipment as efficiently as they can. Improved production processes result in cost savings, flexibility, and in opportunities to plan companies activities more efficiently. The purpose of this research is to examine and cut operational times in food production processes. Two production lines were chosen for closer examination: spread/butter production line and quark production line. The main focus was to prevent operational time losses in these production lines. Research is divided into two separate sections: theoretical and empirical part. Theoretical part formulates guidelines and theoretical basis which is then employed in the empirical part. The theoretical part discusses Lean management philosophy, OEE indicator, SMED and questionnaire research method that comes from the sense and respond theory. In the empirical section, SMED and questionnaire method are used to examine operational activities. The focus is in finding critical characteristics from the production line's starting-, product change-, and closing-setups. Result was that certain characteristics can be found to be critical factors. Those characteristics are connected to operational time losses. Another result is, that SMED and questionnaire research method are an effective way to examine issues with production. Both methods produced similar results in finding development targets from the production line, hence the simultaneous use of both is beneficial, as additional confirmation for the first methods findings can be obtained by securing the result with the other one.