This FMCG Food Manufacturer was seeing a drop in its total productive hours across the week and was struggling to identify the cause of this. Their paper based Production Start Up checklist was noting that they were slow to get started each day – some days it would take them over 60 minutes to get a line operational, resulting in lost wages and lost production.

We digitised all of their production checklists, introduced a digital Gemba Walk checklist for all production leaders to complete each morning and added a QR code on the wall for staff to raise improvement ideas. The digital checklists showed a trend in cleaning issues at start-up, and one of the staff had an improvement idea to resolve these issues that was captured as part of a Gemba Walk. The team was able to introduce a new End of Day cleaning practice that greatly reduced the cleaning required each morning.

Through unlocking frontline observations at scale, this FMCG manufacturer increased it’s productive hours by 3.5 hours per week and reduced their start up time by 30% leading to an increase in production. Moreover, this digital system for leader standard work will be an early warning system for future production issues that may pop up in future.