Manufacturing Process Optimization - Local Food Processing Facility

Our Multidisciplinary Senior Design team, P22705, is working with a local food processing company that has multiple different production lines and facilities across the country. Our team’s goal is to identify system and process improvements on two nearly identical lines at the local facility which can be leveraged to other areas of production. Our first focus was on creating a database with dashboards to highlight important production metrics in real time. The dashboards contain information on maintenance work orders, changeover downtime and production metrics to give engineers higher visibility into how production is running. This visibility can lead to further improvement projects if a common issue is recognized. Our second focus was on decreasing the time it takes to complete production changeovers. We implemented improvements at the packer, labeler and filler with the use of jigs and mistake proofing techniques. We also completed testing to ensure that control sensors on the line are properly set up to avoid needing further adjustments during actual production runs. The changeover improvement tasks require implementation and validation to ensure they are decreasing the total time of changeover tasks.