Tea - Increase capacity

Problem

The packaging of tea in its tea-bag, wrap it in a paper and store it in a box is done by one very sophisticated machine. A tea factory is therefore mainly a hall filled with these machines.

However, the intervention of an operator is still needed (such as new roll of paper, new roll of staples, stoppages). The better a machine works, the more machines an operator can control.

The most important cost for our tea manufacturer is labor cost, and he therefore will express the performance of his plant in manhours per tea-bag. A figure that should be as low as possible.

Solution

Of course we can count the number of tea-bags coming out the plant, and we also know how many people are working to operate the machines. So, no problem to calculate the performance. However, we don't know why it is lower or higher then yesterday. To know this we need to log each event of each machine and each operator.

PROMES can handle these masses of information real-time, and give a prediction of the current performance, and if low the reason why.

Bottom line?

This is an existing example where the plant could grow from 20 to 54 machines without hiring extra people.