Financial consequences
There are many financial consequences:
a) Transfer to a 5-shift system for the packaging line. This has been combined with a
reduction of the shift size. Reducing the fixed shift size led to the need to deploy more
temporary personnel.
b) Transfer to a 5-shift system in the freezing facilities. This includes the deployment of an
extra freezing tunnel.
c) Transportation cost. Transportation from the plant to the freezing facilities is at regular
intervals. Since the packaging line works longer per week now, there are more transports.
d) Planned maintenance is done now on weekdays instead of during weekends. In the
weekends unplanned breakdowns may occur that need immediate repair. This has also
financial consequences.
e) Energy use. More stability leads to less use of energy.
f) Yield and quality effects. It is not clear yet how big these are.
g) Inventory reduction. This has not been realized yet. But it is possible to realize it from
now on, because the run-out time variations have been reduced indeed.
h) Influences on the size of the planning groups. On one hand there is more work, because
of the more complex downloading and uploading procedures. On the other hand there is
more repetition and simplicity. It is not clear yet what the total effect is.
It is not possible to draw final conclusions. The first estimate of the financial consequences is not
right away positive, but there are many possible improvements that could not be estimated yet or
deployed. The management decided to continue this way of production. The financial results
were not considered to be prohibitive and the potential improvements were sufficiently
attractive.