Introduction
Anheuser Busch’s (AB) Merrimack New Hampshire facility, which is one of twelve nation-wide that produce their flagship product Budweiser, produces over 3 million bottles of beer each day (Anheuser-Busch Companies, LLC 2016). Approximately half of the beers produced come in cans, while the other half come in standard glass bottles. AB’s packaging needs are fulfilled by their subsidiary, Anheuser Busch Packaging Company (ABPC). This paper will discuss the product layout for an alternative bottle for beer storage that is able to be frozen while maintaining the high level of quality of AB’s finished product.
Design Considerations
The design of the product layout starts with the current process of creating a glass bottle. The standard …show more content…
The current demand requires 19 bottles per minute (3.2s desired cycle time), while the proposed layout can support 24 bottles per second (2.5s actual cycle time). Future capacity increases will be supported using a one-step expansion strategy to increase total capacity once excess capacity is down to 5% (22 bottles per second). The one-step expansion will entail an additional facility with a layout identical to the proposed. The average increase in demand gives a predicted forecast of a 5% increase taking a total of 2 years. An additional facility will take 20 months to build and debug, which allows 4 months for potential project creep during building. The disadvantage to the design will be that the new facility will have excess capacity for years. To mitigate the excessive up-front costs, the new facility can be purchased and built, but the stocking with equipment can be staged so that the purchase of expensive equipment will be done as capacity …show more content…
The largest issue that the customer could potentially face is downtime within a department that would cause a bottleneck and potentially missed deliveries. The potential bottlenecks have been identified and will be staffed appropriately to ensure all equipment and personnel related risks are mitigated. Related to employees, the departments that require the least number of employees to run them will ensure there are other employees that are trained to that department/work if the standard employee is not available. If, for example, the annealing process, which runs lean with only two employees staffing it on first shift, can identify an employee from another area which runs fat to cross-train and support the area if an employee is out sick or unavailable for other reasons. Additionally, maintenance crews will be hired and trained to ensure all equipment is available. A preventive maintenance program will be implemented to ensure equipment is maintained as needed to prevent any major breakages. Another mitigation to bottlenecks is that the layout identified has multiple pieces of equipment in each area that are producing. With multiple pieces of equipment producing, if one piece of equipment is unable to produce, product can still flow but at a lesser rate than desired. For example, if one of the ten blow molding machines goes down, the layout still allows for a