A bottling and packing plant blamed its filler for lost time. The data told a different story: two lines drew from one shared tank, and the filler kept starving while the downstream boxing machine ran on. The bottleneck was supply timing, not the machine.
The plant had a prime suspect. The filler stopped repeatedly, output suffered, and the maintenance conversation had settled on the machine itself: it was old, it was temperamental, it needed replacing. Every stop reinforced the story. What no one could explain was why a machine that stopped so often ran perfectly well the moment it did run.
Augos monitored the line and looked at when the filler's stops actually happened. They did not correlate with any mechanical fault on the filler. They correlated with the level in the shared supply tank that fed two packing lines at once. When the tank ran low, the filler starved and stopped. When it was full, the filler ran cleanly. The machine wasn't failing, it was waiting.
Two lines drew from one tank, and their timing wasn't synchronised. The downstream boxing machine kept pulling product while the tank was low, so the filler and its own supply were effectively competing for the same liquid.
Once the cause was supply synchronisation rather than a failing machine, the fix moved off the maintenance budget entirely. Coordinating the two lines' draw on the shared tank kept the filler fed, and the stops that had been blamed on it disappeared. The mismatch had been costing the plant more than 30 hours of run-time a month, all of it recoverable without replacing anything.
The lesson repeats across plants: a machine that stops a lot is not always a broken machine. Sometimes it is a starved one, and only data that follows the problem upstream will tell you which.
The filler's stops lined up with an empty or low shared tank, not with any fault on the machine itself. When supply was available the filler ran cleanly; the stops tracked the tank, not the equipment.
The downstream boxing machine kept drawing product while the tank was low, so the filler and its supply were competing. Synchronising the two removed the conflict.
The supply-timing mismatch accounted for more than 30 hours of lost run-time a month, recoverable without touching the filler that had been blamed for it.
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