Are the days of sprawling packaging installations over? Increasingly, many of today’s production priorities, from efficiency, effectiveness and integration to lifetime and environmental costs, appear to overlap with compact equipment design.
Marks & Spencer’s (M&S’s) own-label food and drink suppliers that meet the retailer’s stringent “lean and green” manufacturing and ethical trading standards, as part of its Plan A initiative, are being rewarded with more business, it has emerged.
Food processors have saved millions of pounds by reviving the use of industrial engineering techniques – particularly time and motion studies – which have become a "dead art", according to Alan Donaldson, md of Aim Interims.
Food manufacturing and packaging firms may be investing less in new machinery, but they are looking to overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) analysis to hone their competitive edge, according to Bosch Packaging Technology.
Companies are continuing to exaggerate the efficiency of their manufacturing operations because those collating the data used to measure it frequently ignore delays such as product changeovers and other downtime on equipment and lines.
Establishing an accurate, honest, and, where required, critical picture of 'where we are now' in improvement programmes is never easy. However, it is...