Staggered Changeovers

Production lines can consist of many machines and can include slow operations in some production environments, resulting in a long material transfer times from the start to the end of the process.

When a changeover occurs from material A to material B on a production line, the upstream portion of the production line can begin producing material B, while the end of the production line’s machines continue processing material A. This solution conflicts the application model as a production line can execute one production run at a time.

Line Groups are used to solving this problem. Instead of modeling the production line as one line, with multiple machines:

The application models multiple lines, each containing one or multiple machines: Then group these lines together as a line group.

The allocation of machines to include each line depends on the process flow and the duration of individual operations.

Each line starts to execute the new production run as the material arrives, enabling changeovers to occur progressively as the material flows through the line:

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) can be calculated at Line Group level, as a line group is considered as a single line from a physical and reporting perspective.