Why Food Plants Lose Hours to Changeovers, and What to Do About It

Walk round almost any food factory on a busy week and you will see the same thing: a line standing still while it is stripped down and cleaned between one product and the next. Some of those cleans cannot be avoided. Many can, or can at least be made shorter, simply by running the same orders in a different order.

Changeovers rarely show up as a single line on a report. They hide inside lower output and orders that finish late. Yet they are one of the few sources of lost production time you can reduce without buying anything new for the factory floor.

Where the hours go

A changeover in food manufacturing is rarely just a product swap. Moving from a product that contains milk to one that doesn't means a full allergen clean, validated and signed off, before the next product can run. Changing recipe family or pack size can mean a shorter clean or a tooling change. Each move from one product to the next has its own cost in minutes.

That means the total time lost to changeovers depends less on what you make in a week and more on the order you make it in. Run the dairy-free products first and the dairy ones after, and you may not need a full clean at all. Alternate between them, and you may need five. Across several lines and a full week of production orders, the difference adds up to hours.

Why the plan is hard to get right

Your planners already know this. The difficulty is the size of the puzzle. A week's plan might hold dozens of production orders across several lines, each with a due date, and each pair of products with its own changeover. The number of possible orders grows far faster than anyone can check by hand.

So planners fall back on rules of thumb that are easy to apply and broadly sensible:

• run orders in due-date order, so nothing is late;
• group products by allergen, from "free from" to "contains";
• group products by family, so similar recipes run together.

Each rule works up to a point, and each breaks the others. Due-date order ignores the cleans. Grouping by allergen ignores the due dates. And when a line breaks down on a Tuesday, the plan that took half of Monday to build has to be rebuilt in an hour.

The knowledge that makes a good sequence is usually in your planners' heads, or in a spreadsheet only one person understands. That makes it hard to check, and hard to cover when someone is on holiday.

What to do about it

Whatever system you use, you can start before buying any software.

Write your changeover rules down

List how long each kind of move takes on each line, such as from a product containing an allergen to one free from it, or from one family to another. Agree which cleans are fixed by your food safety plan and can never be shortened. This alone often shows where the time goes.

Measure the plan you have

Before changing anything, total the changeover minutes in your current plan for a typical week, and count the full cleans. Without that baseline, you cannot tell whether a new approach is better.

Compare against your rules of thumb

A proposed sequence is only worth adopting if it beats what your planners would do anyway, while keeping every clean your rules require and every order on time.

Doing it inside Business Central

We built Schedrix™ Production Sequencing to do exactly this inside Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. You write your changeover rules in plain English, the way you would explain them to a new starter, and Schedrix shows you how it read each one before you confirm it. Allergen cleans are treated as fixed: no other rule can shorten them.

Schedrix then works out a proposed order for each line, for the fewest full cleans or the fewest changeover minutes. It puts the proposal next to your current plan and next to simple ways of ordering the same work, so you can see what it would save and which orders, if any, would finish late. If it looks right, you apply it. If you change your mind, Revert puts the plan back. When a line goes down, you describe what happened in a sentence. Schedrix reads it back as downtime for you to check, then replans the rest of the week from now.

Schedrix proposes; your planners decide. Nothing moves in Business Central until someone chooses Apply.

Where to start

If your plant runs on Business Central and changeovers cost you more time than they should, start with your rules and your baseline. Then see what a better sequence would look like on your own orders.

We are offering free pilots to food and drink manufacturers. Find out more about Schedrix, or get in touch to talk about a pilot.