Food Producer, Central Europe

Multi-Station Packaging Line Retrofit

Four linked stations that stopped each other constantly. Rebuilt line interlocking and accumulation control lifted real throughput without any mechanical change.

Challenge

A four-station line was achieving well below its rated output. Each station performed to specification on its own, but in combination they blocked and starved each other, and every minor stop propagated along the whole line.

Solution

The line control was re-conceived as a single system rather than four machines sharing a conveyor: accumulation zones with real capacity awareness, release logic based on downstream state, and a recovery sequence that restarts stations in the correct order after a stop.

Result

Sustained line output rose substantially with no mechanical modification. Downtime is now recorded by station and by reason, so the remaining losses are visible instead of assumed.

Engineering Work

Line Interlocking Design
PLC Programming
Accumulation Control
Cycle Time Analysis
OEE Data Collection

The first week was measurement, not programming. Cycle time and blocked/starved state were logged per station for several shifts, which showed that the bottleneck was not the station everybody blamed.

Most of the gain came from two changes: allowing accumulation zones to hold product instead of stopping the upstream station immediately, and restarting stations in dependency order after a stop rather than all at once.