Simulation for Packaging & Consumer Products
Five Good Machines Don’t Make a Good Line

A packaging line is a series. The filler, capper, labeler, case packer and palletizer can each hit their targets while the line still misses badly. What matters is how their stoppages interact, not how each machine performs alone. The arithmetic is harsh, and it's why 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's a single-machine benchmark. Put five machines at 85% in series with no buffering between them and the line comes out near 44%, even though nothing has gone wrong.

Buffering, sequencing and constraint management exist to recover that gap. How much you can recover depends on which machine stops, for how long, how often, and what's sitting between it and its neighbors. Those are dynamics, not averages, so a spreadsheet can't 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

The upstream process is continuous or batch, while packaging is a series of discrete machines. They rarely want to run at the same rate, so the surge capacity between them is the main design question. Too little and the making process stops, and that's usually the expensive end. Too much and you've paid for storage that buys nothing.

SKU count multiplies changeovers

Every size, format, label and allergen sequence adds changeovers, and changeovers interact with everything else. A schedule that's 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 all the time rather than now and then. Eliminating it can return much more uptime than its recorded downtime suggests. It's the 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