Accumulating Efficiency

So your organization has flirted with or even implemented Enterprise Resource Planning, Lean Manufacturing, Kanban, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Taguchi, Feng Shui, and a host of other quality and productivity initiatives.



What's next? How do you squeeze more productivity from a plant when the operation is, theoretically, already optimized? There is a proven method. It's called Automated Product Accumulation.



Initially, "product accumulation" might sound like a problem, not a solution. Certainly accumulating product in the general sense of the term would work against efforts for increased throughput or productivity gains.



But for organizations using in-line processing, strategically placed product accumulation can significantly increase overall throughput, especially when the accumulation is automated.



Think back to operations management class, where throughput or productivity were defined as "the value of outputs divided by the value of inputs." A common way to measure this is "units produced per unit time".



For example, with book binding, there are typically several machines working together to produce the finished product. These machines might include a gatherer, binder, saw, trimmer, stacker, cartoner, palletizer. Together they're components of an in-line process. If you line the machines up end to end, the output of one directly feeds the input of the next.



This system works until one machine shuts down due to a jam, misalignment, or other issue. Since each machine's output feeds a downstream machine's input, one machine going down anywhere in the lineup stops the entire production line.



The upstream machines must stop feeding the off-line machine. The downstream machines stop cycling because they lose their input feeds. The cascading effect is immediate and all encompassing.



In live production environments, some machines must be shutdown thousands of times a year. Sometimes a shutdown consumes just a few seconds, to allow a quick adjustment. Other times it requires minutes, hours, and in crisis situations, days.



Even a few seconds of downtime is enough to require other in-line machinery to stop. Automated accumulation helps solve this problem. It enables all other machines in a line to keep running when one goes down.



Automated accumulation requires conveyors that transport products directly from the discharge of one machine to the infeed of the next. The process can be flexible in the quantity of units retained, and accept more in-process products without having to offload any.



This particular ability is called "accumulation" or "buffering". When the downstream machine is off-line and the upstream machine is still discharging, the products accumulate while waiting for the downstream machine to come back online.