Efficiency study reduces annual travel distance time by 350+ hours
Our client, a pet food company that produces dog and cat foods, brought in CRB’s consulting solutions team to evaluate current work practices and procedures, recommend opportunities to improve efficiency and optimize work processes and flows.
The client’s vision for its Pet Nutrition Center is to make effective use of people and technology, address ergonomic and safety issues, and increase the overall productivity of the site allowing more testing in the future. The operational efficiency study for this project focused on different types of animal colonies, central services, cleaning, and kitchen area. We identified a number of opportunities for improvements that can help our client save hundreds of hours of travel time and increase time spent conducting testing.
Project Details
Client
Confidential Client
The Process:
Our team started with data collection efforts, interviewing staff, and shadowing to understand workflows and procedures. This allowed us to develop an operations analysis tool and labor model. We then evaluated material movement and labor activities through time studies, flow maps, and ergonomic assessments. This helped our consulting team develop a list of more than 80 improvement opportunities that aim to increase capacity, reduce non-value-added activities, and improve safety and ergonomics.
The purpose of the facility is testing, but the data collection shows that majority of labor is spent on support activities. By implementing recommended improvement opportunities, the client will will be able to increase testing time..
Results
- The adjacencies identified reconfigured the layout to reduce travel time by 350 labor hours annually. No significant capital investment was required to achieve these changes.
- A capacity model will help area owners to schedule their resources and increase focus on value-added activities.
- New layouts for benches will help to reduce wasted motion, time, and improve ergonomics.
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