Simulation for Packaging & Consumer Products
Five Good Machines Do Not Make a Good Line

A packaging line is a series. Filler, capper, labeller, case packer, palletiser — each one can hit its target and the line can still miss badly, because what matters is not how each machine performs but how their stoppages interact. That arithmetic is unforgiving, and it is the reason so many well-run CPG lines sit far below the number their machine reports suggest.

The arithmetic nobody likes

85% OEE is the world-class benchmark, and it is a single-machine benchmark. Put five machines at 85% in series with no buffering between them and the line comes out near 44%. Nothing has gone wrong. Every machine is world class. The line is at less than half.

That gap is what buffering, sequencing and constraint management exist to recover, and how much you can recover depends entirely on which machine stops, for how long, how often, and what is sitting between it and its neighbours. Those are dynamics, not averages, which is why a spreadsheet cannot answer it.

Is 85% OEE achievable on your line? works through the arithmetic in full.

What makes CPG lines their own problem

Making and packing keep different time

Process upstream is continuous or batch; packaging is a series of discrete machines. They rarely want to run at the same rate, and the surge capacity between them is the entire design question. Too little and the making process stops — usually the expensive end. Too much and you have paid for storage that buys nothing.

SKU count multiplies changeovers, not just variety

Every size, format, label and allergen sequence adds changeovers, and changeovers interact with everything else: a schedule that is efficient for one product mix can be badly wrong for another. When the mix moves, the constraint can move with it.

Micro-stops beat rare long ones

A stoppage measured in seconds looks negligible on a loss report. On a tightly coupled line it never lets buffers refill, so its cost is carried continuously rather than occasionally — and eliminating it can return substantially more uptime than its recorded downtime suggests. This is the single most common misranking on a CPG loss tree.

Rework and reblend make storage circular

Material re-introduced into the process is good economics and terrible for capacity planning, because the flow into storage is no longer just the making rate. Scheduling changes the recycle volume, the recycle volume changes the storage requirement, and the storage requirement constrains what can be scheduled.

Packaging and consumer products work on this site

Where to start

The browser sandbox runs a five-machine bottling line with no download and no sign-up — the same series-of-machines problem described above, with the numbers exposed. If you would rather read first: the 85% arithmetic, which loss to fix first, and how big a buffer should be.

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