Fault-reduction collecting goods

A food manufacturer had a lot of rework through incorrectly composed clusters. A cluster is a collection of weighed raw materials that have been collected to produce specific recipes.

Problem

Every week, the bottleneck installation regularly stopped because of the rework that had to be done as a result of an incorrectly compiled recipe. These errors in production were caused by the fact that each employee put together the pallets in his or her own way. As a result, things were often forgotten or weighed wrongly, which meant that corrections had to be made later on.

Application

After the cause analysis, it was established that a standard was missing and that the training method needed to be improved.

- Experienced employees with knowledge of the work are trained as TWI Job Instructors.

- The tasks that had to ensure that the employees no longer made such mistakes were listed.

- The inventoried tasks were analysed and the resulting standard was recorded in a Job Breakdown sheet.

- After having checked who had to be trained for what, the employees were trained in accordance with the standard.

Results

The number of errors has been significantly reduced in a short period of time. This was due to the fact that the employees were trained to carry out the tasks properly at once. Because not all tasks that caused errors were identified from the start, the number of errors was not immediately reduced to zero. This was achieved at a later stage.
It is therefore important, prior to an implementation, to make a good inventory of which tasks will produce the desired result.