Factory line audits

ITCM helps customers to identify opportunities for breakthrough improvements in productivity.
Through our factory line audits, we aim to find solutions for our customers that provide a genuine competitive advantage in the marketplace.

When we visit a factory, our expertise in manufacturing and packaging brings fresh ideas to the fore. Our on-site audit team can assist an improvement process, providing initial ideas and fact-based recommendations for the operations staff to try. We support our recommendations with estimated gains in throughput, yield, and other cost drivers. Long-term opportunities are also identified and matched with future business objectives.

An audit will typically last one week and will focus on learning quickly about the issues and challenges faced by the operation. We adopt a “go and see” approach to ensure that we understand the actual production environment and day-to-day operations. We engage with operations staff to understand front-line issues and collect performance data from the line. We then help to turn this into useful knowledge that is used to identify, quantify and prioritise actions for improvement.

This process provides a deep understanding of a production line, focusing our engineers’ attention on the bottom line. Our factory visits regularly identify unit operations that benefit significantly from innovation and new ideas.

LineLite™ performance tracking

ITCM offers a robust and effective performance tracking system to help identify, prioritise and sustain improvement activities. LineLite™ is an easy-to-use system which quickly enables monitoring and reporting of key performance indicators such as MTBF, MTTR and OEE for a production line. Downtime causes are tracked and prioritised based upon their impact on the bottleneck operation. Improvements are then focused where there will be the largest benefit. Long-term trends are also tracked to verify improvements.

For our custom-build machinery solutions, LineLite™ is invaluable to support the Continuous Improvement phase at the customer’s facility. It enables design to be quickly optimised and supports vertical ramp-up into production.

LineLite™ automatically generates concise reports, on a single page, that are easily understood by team members. This promotes common ownership and understanding and encourages creative ideas from all production staff. The initial improvements can be very significant. Stabilising the bottleneck process and consistently meeting production targets removes the need for ‘fire-fighting’ and frees the team to focus on optimising surrounding operations. Maintenance staff can shift from a reactive posture to proactive one, finding improvements rather than solving crises.