Where does the time on the line actually go?
- Data
- Day-to-day operations logs from manual production work.
- Built
- A timeline of planned against actual activity, with idle time broken out per operator.
- Result
- Operators' time optimised, and the actual time on each line monitored.
The question
Manual operations produce a large amount of data that nobody looks at twice. The management team could see output, but not where the hours in between were going, so any decision about staffing or sequencing came down to opinion.
What we did
We took the operational logs as they were and turned them into one view of the working day: what was planned, what actually happened, and where the gaps sat. Idle time is attributed per operator and per step, so the discussion moves from whether there is slack to where it is.
What it changed
Operators' time was optimised, and the actual time spent on each line is now monitored, so staffing and sequencing decisions rest on what happened.