The sister-line that ran at half speed
A tea and spice packer had three identical lines. Two performed. One quietly ran at roughly half their OEE, and nobody could say why. The downtime data resolved the mystery to a single recurring failure code, and the 61 hours a month it was costing.
- Three identical lines, one at roughly half the OEE of the other two.
- The gap was invisible until downtime was categorised by failure code.
- One recurring code accounted for 61 hours of lost run-time a month.
- Once the cause had a name and an hour figure, it became an engineering task.
Your plant, the same method. One sensor per line, live within 48 hours of the kit arriving.
Three lines, one that lagged
The plant ran three packing lines built to the same specification, doing the same job. Two of them performed as expected. The third consistently produced less, and had done so for long enough that its lower output had become the number everyone quietly planned around. Ask why, and you got theories: an older machine, a difficult product, a tougher shift. None of them were measured.
Because the three lines were judged against a shared target, the shortfall on the weak line was absorbed into the site total. On paper the plant looked broadly fine. On the floor, one line was leaving a shift's worth of product on the table every few days.
Splitting the OEE by cause
Augos monitored all three lines and, crucially, broke each line's downtime out by failure code rather than reporting a single availability figure. The gap stopped being a mystery almost immediately. The two healthy lines lost time to the normal spread of changeovers and interruptions (what standard OEE calls minor stops or micro-stops). The third lost the same normal time plus a large, repeating block attributed to one specific failure code.
A single recurring stoppage was costing the line roughly 61 hours of run-time a month. It never looked like a breakdown because each occurrence was short, but it happened relentlessly, all shift, every shift.
From mystery to a named cause
Once the cause had a name and an hour figure attached to it, it became an engineering task rather than a debate. Its two sisters lost no comparable block to that code, on the same product with the same crews.
The broader lesson held for the whole site: identical machines do not guarantee identical output, and a shared target will hide the one that is struggling. Only per-line, per-cause data makes the laggard, and the reason for it, impossible to miss.
More results like this.
What monitoring reveals when you leave it running
One line, watched continuously for four months. Planned downtime took a third of its time, and the trend kept surfacing slow drifts a one-off audit would miss.
Read the case study → Food and beverage · Beverage bottlerThe filler was not the problem
A beverage bottler blamed its filler for a line that kept stopping. The first month of monitoring showed 9,848 stops, nearly a quarter of paid time spent waiting, and an air-supply loss of over 34 hours.
Read the case study → Packaging and bags · Bag manufacturerThree shifts, one live board
A three-shift bag maker tracked output on paper, one number per shift. Demand was rising and nobody could say whether the machines had headroom. A live record of every stop answered it with data.
Read the case study →Why hadn't anyone noticed the gap before?
The three lines shared a single throughput target, and the underperformer's shortfall was absorbed into the site total. Without per-line, per-cause data it read as normal variation.
What was the failure code?
A recurring stoppage that tripped the line repeatedly through each shift. Individually each stop was short, so it never registered as a breakdown, but it dominated the line's lost hours.
What does this case leave out?
The line's results after the fix. Those are the plant's own to publish, so this case reports what the record found: one code, 61 hours a month.
Find losses like these on your own line.
A 30-minute call with a manufacturing specialist. We look at one of your lines together and show you what the first week of data would say about it.
- Live within 48 hours of your kit arriving
- One sensor, one terminal, no PLC and nothing to integrate
- R4,950 per line per month, ex VAT. 90 days, then a month's notice