In today’s competitive economy and varying supply chain, manufacturers face pressures to increase production efficiency and meet increasing consumer demands, while still keeping their focus on quality. Consumers expect a breadth of diverse, innovative products, and manufacturers have to adapt to smaller, more targeted production runs to meet demand and minimize excess inventory. Add to that post COVID regulation changes and stringent food safety practices, the war in Ukraine, and challenging workforce dynamics including worker shortages and a retiring workforce.
Most manufacturing plants run multiple products per line per day, including varieties of the same products as well as different ones. Different products produced on the same line have resulted in more production line changeovers in the factory compared to even just a few years ago, which often required processes, people and equipment to adapt accordingly. And changeover strategies that are successful on a product line need to scale to an enterprise level through best practice sharing and leveraging cloud and analytics.