Manufacturing Operations Management Keep Companies Healthy

A MOM system and framework enable food processors to reduce overfilling without increasing the risk of customer complaints. In one case, within just a few weeks of implementing its MOM system, a company discovered that it had been giving away more product than it had estimated. Now that the new system has made it easier for operators to enter sample weights, the company has significantly increased data accuracy and reduced overpacking without sacrificing brand equity or customer satisfaction.

Another commonly reported benefit of deploying MOM technology and best practices is reduced product scrap and rework as a result of lower quarantine time. When quality checks are performed manually or on paper, there is always a good chance that some of the checks will be missed or completed late. This problem is inevitable in a fast-paced, real-time food-processing environment.

If a weight check that is performed 30 or 40 minutes late, for instance, reveals that the product is out of spec, all of the product that was filled up to the time of the last quality check must be quarantined, retested, and possibly reworked. In most production lines today, this could easily translate into thousands of units of wasted product.

Until recently, this waste wouldn’t have been a pressing issue for most companies. But with raw material costs still escalating, quarantine and rework are much more important—not to mention the additional energy, labor, and opportunity costs of rerunning a sizeable batch of product.

By digitizing the process and making it more transparent, MOM systems build discipline into quality checks and ensure that all checks are completed on time. Quality managers are immediately alerted of any late checks so that they can take action to reduce the amount of product that must be quarantined, retested, and reworked.

In food plants today, process inefficiencies and misallocations of labor are forcing companies to perform unnecessary or redundant quality checks and audits. The fear of putting the brand at risk compels many to continue these inefficient practices. Only by completely digitizing the quality check process can food processors consistently drive accountability. This change ensures that all checks are completed on time while improving data accuracy.

Digitizing the quality check process often enables companies to eliminate redundant tasks and shift labor to more productive analysis and improvement activities that produce greater tangible value. Breyers’ MOM system automatically time stamps and documents all quality checks with the person who performed them. This built-in accountability helped the company go from 50 to 60% quality-check completion to 98% completion in just two weeks.

Cut Capital Expenditures

Another critical impact area for MOM technology and practices is capital expenditures. Food processors that embark on a MOM initiative often report significant savings from avoiding additional investments in quality management technology, new equipment, production lines, and plants. This is a key advantage, considering that only 11% of food manufacturing executives interviewed for the CDC Factory study could claim that at least 50% of their capital projects actually delivered their intended benefit.

MOM has also been proven to help food processors unlock their human potential by producing a more motivated, focused, and accountable workforce—one that can deliver instant, tangible performance improvement across all plants year after year, not just a one-time improvement on a piece of equipment or production line. In light of increasingly challenging economic conditions, the notion that a people-centric approach to improvement provides a dependable platform for ongoing, measurable cross-plant improvements must be given serious consideration. And, considering that unlocking the latent human contribution is nowhere near as capital-intensive as an equipment- or plant-focused initiative, this systematic, people-based approach to accelerating efficiency improvements is more relevant than ever.