Introduction
A leading North India brewery was losing throughput to a problem hiding in plain sight: unplanned downtime on its packaging lines. Average line availability hovered around 75%, driven by frequent breakdowns, slow changeovers and reactive maintenance. The constraint wasn’t equipment capacity — it was how consistently the existing equipment could be kept running.
The objective was to lift availability to 85% by reducing breakdowns, increasing machine uptime and optimising manpower utilisation — without adding new assets.
Finding the Real Losses
The team began with a downtime Pareto analysis across the filler and packaging equipment, isolating the handful of breakdown categories responsible for most of the lost time. Root-cause analysis on the major breakdowns traced problems back to specific failure modes, rather than treating downtime as one undifferentiated number.
From Reactive Repairs to a Reliability System
A Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) reduction program targeted how quickly the team could recover once a stoppage happened. Alongside it, a predictive and preventive maintenance cadence caught more failures before they became stoppages at all.
Structured action plans and Kaizen events addressed the chronic, recurring losses directly — turning one-off fixes into standardised changes that held.
Results: More Output from the Same Lines
Availability improved to 85%, with all three packaging lines running above 84% in January and February — up from a range of 65–82% in prior months. That translated into a 10% increase in production output using the same assets and manpower, 1,500 minutes of downtime eliminated, and an 11% reduction in fixed and overhead cost per case.Achieved higher throughput from the same assets without additional capital expenditure.
Capability Lift
Maintenance and production teams were upskilled in predictive maintenance techniques. Cross-functional problem-solving for root-cause analysis and action closure became stronger and faster. Ongoing SOP and process-improvement training was embedded directly on the shop floor to sustain the gains.
Why This Matters for You?
Unlock hidden capacity without capex. Stabilise filler and labeler performance and uptime. Turn chronic stoppages into standard work and fast recovery.
Can We Do This for You?
Absolutely!
Let’s connect for a 20-minute web meeting — we’ll walk you through a tailored roadmap to achieve breakthrough performance at your company.
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If you’re facing similar challenges in your manufacturing process, write to us! Learn how you can achieve the same significant improvements in productivity and cost savings by implementing Lean Six Sigma tools.
