Production Line Speed-Up

Project Overview

Every production facility that's growing will seek to understand if, from a financial standpoint,it's best to purchase a new production line, or to improve existing ones. This process involves understanding the current state of the assets, the bottlenecks, technical feasibility, and various skilled individuals across process, mechanical, and electrical disciplines.

In 2016, Vlad was asked to evaluate the path toward increasing the speed of a production line at a state-of-art facility in Lewiston / Auburn, ME.

What It Takes

1. A complete assessment of all aspects of the production line - process, mechanical, electrical. From an electrical / automation standpoint, it's usually simple to "increase" the command speed of a line. What's much more challenging is understanding which components will fail - control systems, sensors, vision systems, etc.
2. A comprehensive report on what needs to be improved, what can remain as-is, and what needs to be altered versus rebuild completely.
3. A collaborative effort of reviewing requirements of the facility, various stakeholders, and an alignment of how to approach various complex engineering challenges.
4. A lengthy process of compiling a BOM for specific areas, communication with various vendors, and adjustment of plans / requirements based on what's found in the field.
5. A deployment / integration of new systems, migration of old systems to "better ones," and ongoing troubleshooting of various issues that weren't accounted for.

Conlusion

At the end of 6 months of work, the facility received a single line overhaul with a production increase of over 20%. The single line overhaul was then packaged by an operations team and deployed to other assets resulting in substantial production increases across various product lines.