The Situation
A food processing facility faced a pre-Easter demand surge requiring 25,000 meals per day — roughly 40% above normal run rate. Previous years had relied on heavy overtime and temporary labor, blowing up the labor budget and creating quality issues from fatigued crews.
What We Did
Takt time redesign. Calculated the required takt for 25K meals/day and mapped it against actual cycle times at each station. Found three bottlenecks that could be solved without capital — crew rebalancing, stagger-start scheduling, and a SMED event on the salad line changeover.
Crew balancing. Rebuilt the crew matrix to balance workload across stations instead of having overloaded constraints and idle upstream positions. Cross-trained 8 operators on secondary positions to enable flexible deployment.
Schedule adherence. Installed a visual schedule board with hourly tracking. Shift leads owned the cadence. Any miss greater than 15 minutes triggered an immediate response, not an end-of-shift discussion.
Results (Verified)
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Daily output | 25,000 meals/day sustained |
| Overtime | Zero |
| Quality | No increase in customer complaints |
| Method | Takt redesign + crew balancing |
Key Takeaway
You don’t always need capital or overtime to hit surge targets. Sometimes the capacity is already on the floor — it’s just allocated wrong. A takt analysis and crew rebalance cost nothing and delivered 40% more throughput.
Company details anonymized. Engagement completed under contract leadership.