Packaging

Low Volume 10 to 40 ppm

In this environment the component operations in the process to manufacture start to become coupled together by material handling due to the cost of manual handling. At this juncture the ability to store product between operations is eliminated.  The component operations now become a system, which requires all component operations to be running simultaneously in order to product output.  If one machine fails all others stop and wait for the failed component to come back on line.  The output of a production system can be predicted at this point by a simple probability calculation, which predicts the probability of all components of the line running at the same time.

Medium Volume – 40 to 200 ppm

The same conditions of Low Volume apply to Medium Volume.  In addition, with rates above 40 PPM, the methods of production and material handling move into the realm of continuous motion devices as opposed to intermittent motion. When this occurs the cost of the production equipment becomes more expensive due to complexity of the machine components.  As a result of this increased complexity, the probability of failure becomes greater and in turn worsening the compounding effect of machine failures and further reducing the probability of all machines running simultaneously. 

High Volume – 200 plus ppm

In this arena, all of the issues involved in Medium Volume environments become magnified.  The production rates are so high, that any malfunction of any component device causes significant impact to the ability of the line to produce product.  If one machine malfunctions and others are forced to stop, the machines that forced to stop experience difficulty at restart because of a variety of inertial and quality problems when trying to restart. This is the concept of induced downtime.  Induced down time is down time experienced by a machine that did not fail on its own but was forced to stop, then experienced difficulty in restarting.  This is a common occurrence in very high-speed machines that take a significant time period to come up to speed and begin to produce output that meets the required quality standards.