Ferry Manufacturing Snippets: 6th May - 12th May 2024

Here's the weekly digest of Ferry's manufacturing snippets!

Monday - 6th May

Private label manufacturing is surging. In Europe alone it's grown by over 20% in just 3 years.

It's not just the cost of living crisis that has pushed consumers to seek more affordable alternatives to big brand name products.

It's also a reflection of the significant improvement in the quality of private label manufacturing, driven by improvements in process & automation. The days of assuming that a private label product is inferior to its branded counterpart are long gone.

Manufacturers get to focus on operational efficiency and service a large 'portfolio' of demand.

Retailers get to leverage their existing distribution power to undercut branded products, and not have to worry about manufacturing capability.

It's the new normal

Tuesday - 7th May

85% of manufacturing data goes unused

If you make use of it, it can save you millions

Manufacturers invest heavily into new automation equipment and processes to improve efficiency. And that works. Really well

The missed opportunity is then to use the data from that investment to continuously optimize operations even further

Which means that you then don't have to spend another $10m,$100m, $1bn+ to create new production lines, sites and capacity

You can do more with less, and avoid needless capex

(PS: That 85% is actually higher than the average of ~73% that most large companies are faced with!)

Wednesday - 8th May

OEE is a great summary metric, but it is just that: a summary

Analyzing its components (availability, performance, quality) can help, but often doesn't go far enough

Looking at OEE for a given production line without breaking it down implicitly assumes that every product ('SKU') running on that line is the same

Which if you're producing a single product is great!

But most manufacturers produce hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of different products on one line

Therefore OEE needs to be assessed on a SKU basis, and taking that to its limit, on an individual batch / lot basis too

The variations between them - for the same piece of equipment - are often staggering

And that's where the efficiency opportunities lie

Thursday - 9th May

One of the standout learnings we've had whilst building Ferry is realizing how much manual data work there is in manufacturing.

It's common for manufacturers to have up to 5 (or even more) different systems per site. They have a SCADA, an MES, a data historian, an OEE tracker, a CMMS ...

But then you realize that despite all this data, no one is able to make good use of it!

The challenge is about data movement. Porting data from one system to another, performing analysis across data sets from different systems, putting that result into another system etc becomes extremely tedious.

Some have tried to tackle this in-house with homegrown data pipelines, which is hard to do & maintain. But often, folks resort to good old Excel.

It gets exponentially more difficult when you have multiple sites, divisions & orgs, especially if you acquire companies with completely different systems.

It's one of the root cause problems that plagues the industry