Food manufacturer: more output from the same plant, and far less waste
- INDUSTRY
- Food manufacturing: packaged foods
- LOCATION
- Malappuram, Kerala, India
- ENGAGEMENT
- 5 months
- FOCUS
- Production planning, wastage and yield, stock control, quality
The challenge
Demand from distributors was growing, and the plant was running flat out. Still, fast-moving products kept running short while slow movers sat in the store close to their expiry dates. Production was planned from experience and from whoever called loudest that morning.
Changeovers were frequent and long, quality checks varied from shift to shift, and expired stock coming back from the market was quietly eating into the margin. The plant made about 140 products, at around 450 tonnes a month. Wastage and expiry returns cost roughly ₹ 12 lakh a month.
What we found
We walked the line on every shift, weighed what went in against what came out, and put a rupee value on every loss from raw material to the distributor's shelf.
-
01
Production was not linked to sales.The plant made what was easy to make, not what the market was asking for. Stock-outs on the top 20 products cost about ₹ 8 lakh a month in lost sales, and expiry returns ran at around ₹ 5 lakh a month.
-
02
Time was lost between runs.Unplanned stoppages and long changeovers cut the plant's real capacity. About 9 hours a week were lost, roughly 12% of capacity.
-
03
Wastage was never measured.Yield losses at each stage went unrecorded, so nobody owned them. Losses across the stages came to about 4%, roughly ₹ 7 lakh a month.
What we built
Across the layers of the Organise to Grow model.
The results
The plant now makes what the market needs, in the right order, with less time lost between runs. Wastage is measured and falling, expiry returns are down, and the extra output came from the same plant and people. Output per shift rose 22% and overall yield improved from 91% to 95%. Expiry returns fell by more than half.
