CASE STUDIES
RC Bigelow empowered with operating transparency and
increases uptime, throughput and labor efficiencyÂ
increases uptime, throughput and labor efficiencyÂ
PROBLEM
RC Bigelow is a tea bag manufacturer with three production lines at one of their main production plants. A major problem they had was an excessive amount of unscheduled downtime that couldn’t be attributed to a known mechanical problem. The most common legitimate reason to shut down a line down was to change the wire spool when it ran out. However, the downtime occurred more frequently than spool changes would have indicated. Therefore, the RC Bigelow management team wanted to better understand downtime to spot trends and attribute reasons so they could proactively solve these issues.Â
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SOLUTION
ACS created an integrated solution that included multiple Allen Bradley PLCs with a database for reporting. The PLCs were programmed to track downtime on different products by time, line and operator. We also developed reporting tools that gave them the capability to easily extract the data and analysis capabilities to evaluate the downtime incidents more effectively. For example, they found that operators were opening an access door on the wire machine prior to the spools needing to be changed. In this instance, the spools didn’t need to be changed, the workers were just opening the doors to stop production and take a break.
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RESULTS
Our solution enabled RC Bigelow to know exactly when a machine was down and why. This new intelligence gave our client the ability to increase uptime, throughput and labor efficiency.
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