Reducing changeover time
Changeover is the most recoverable capacity in most plants, and the least measured. Where the hours actually go.
Changeover is usually the largest block of sellable time a site gives away, and the one nobody has timed properly. Most plants can tell you what a changeover is meant to take and very few can tell you what it actually took last Tuesday.
The single biggest gain in most operations is separating work that must happen while the line is stopped from work that could have happened while it was still running. Preparing the next batch, staging materials, having tooling ready and pre-warmed — none of that requires a stopped line, and all of it routinely happens after the stop.
The second is sequencing. A changeover between two similar products is a fraction of one between an allergen-containing product and a free-from one. The order you run a week in is a lever most sites treat as fixed because it follows the order brands booked.
What to actually do
- Time it before you improve itActual elapsed minutes, from last good unit to first good unit. The gap between that and the assumed figure is usually where the opportunity is.
- Split internal from external workAnything that can be done while the line still runs, should be. This alone typically recovers more than any equipment change.
- Stage materials before the stopWaiting for a pallet with the line down is the most expensive kind of waiting there is.
- Sequence the week deliberatelyLow allergen to high, delicate before citrus. Booking order is not a production constraint unless you let it be.
- Standardise the procedure and let the line write itThe people doing it know where the minutes go. A checklist written in an office will be quietly ignored.
- Feed the real figures back into your rate cardIf a changeover genuinely takes four hours, a rate card assuming two is charging brands for a factory you do not have.
NextBatch holds your changeover rules — standard, and the extra days after allergens or citrus — and applies them when a brand tries to book. A slot that cannot physically run is not offered.