In Speed We Trust
By John R Henry MBA, CPP
That’s the tagline from a company called Tunercult.com Speed has always been foremost in many auto racing fan’s minds. It’s the name of the game, right?
Wrong.
Winning is the name of the game and the fastest car doesn’t always win.
If Danica Patrick’s car is 10% faster than everyone else at Indy, that’s fantastic! Until she blows an engine on lap 198 and fails to finish.
If her car is 10% faster but she has to pit for fuel every 25 laps, that speed isn’t doing her any good. It’s winning, not speed, that is important in racing. The fastest car is not always first across the finish line. It’s like that in packaging, too. Some people put a lot of emphasis on running the line fast. The problem is, customers do not pay for fast lines. Customers pay for POP.
POP is what Rich Frain calls Product-On-Pallet. Forget how fast the line is running. The only thing that counts is how many products you get on pallets and out the door to your customer. That’s what you get paid for and that’s the only thing you get paid for unless you have some unusual business model.
A line that runs 300ppm (packages per minute) but rejects 10% of them, is not running 300ppm. It is running 270ppm. That slow running screws up production plans and schedules. Worse, you now have over 14,000 products at the end of the shift that you have spent money making, that you will spend money reworking or discarding and that you will not receive money for selling.
Higher speeds also increase wear and tear on machinery and people. These costs are diffuse and you may not see them. They’re still there and it’s still a loss.
You may be better off running the line at 275ppm with 1% rejects. At the end of the shift you will have 130,680 POP that you’ll get paid for and only 1,320 rejects to deal with. That’s an extra thousand products but more importantly, many fewer rejects and attendant losses.
Sometimes slower is faster.
To paraphrase Vince Lombardi “POP isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
Use our free Changeover Loss Calculator to get a rough estimate of what changeover is costing your operation in tangible terms. The intangible costs — responsiveness, flexibility, the deals you didn't even know you lost — are harder to put in a spreadsheet. That's usually where a conversation helps more than a calculator.
John Henry | The Changeover Wizard 📞 1-787-550-9650 ✉️ johnhenry@changeover.com