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Production Performance

Production Line Has Recurring Stops

A line loses output through frequent small stops, blocking, starvation, waiting, speed loss, or repeated operator intervention.

Engineering decision

Identify where production time is actually being lost and separate the bottleneck from symptoms elsewhere on the line.

Preserve first

Evidence worth collecting before the condition changes

  • Time-stamped stop reason and duration
  • Line state before and after each stop
  • Output by hour or shift
  • Upstream/downstream starvation or blocking
  • Manual interventions, changeovers, cleaning, quality holds, and material waits
Separate the explanations

Questions that improve the diagnosis

  • Which event consumes the most total time, not only the longest single stop?
  • Where does work accumulate or disappear?
  • Is the constraint equipment, material, labour, quality, utility, or scheduling related?
  • Can existing PLC/VFD/counter signals provide trustworthy state evidence?
Avoid premature action

What not to conclude too early

  • Optimising the fastest machine instead of the constraint
  • Calling all non-production time 'downtime' without categories
  • Buying monitoring hardware before defining the decision