Food Processing · Case study
Three times the output from the same plant, without new land
A fruit pulp line rated at 5 tonnes per hour that delivered 2.8 on a good day, with the promoters about to buy land for a second plant.
- Client
- Veerbhadra Foods
- Location
- Nashik, Maharashtra
- Duration
- 9 months
- Engagement
- Operations Excellence retainer
Headline result
2.8 → 4.6 TPH
Line output
A 64% increase, same equipment
The situation
What we walked into
Veerbhadra processed tomato and mango pulp for institutional buyers. Demand exceeded supply, and the board had approved ₹7 crore of land acquisition for a second facility.
Nobody in the business had measured overall equipment effectiveness. Production reporting arrived weekly, by which point the previous week's losses were unrecoverable and unattributable.
Yield loss was assumed to be 'about 4%'. It was not measured at any point in the process, and there was no mass balance for the line.
What we did
The engagement, phase by phase
Including the phase the client least enjoyed, which in most of our case studies is the second one.
Phase 1 · Weeks 1–4
Measure before changing anything
Four weeks of shift-by-shift logging of availability, performance and quality losses, plus a full mass balance across the line. True OEE was 31%, not the 56% the team believed. Yield loss was 7.1%, concentrated in two places nobody had instrumented.
Phase 2 · Weeks 5–6
Rank the losses in rupees
Changeover time, an undersized pulper feed, unplanned pump maintenance and evaporator fouling accounted for 78% of the loss, in that order. The ranked list changed the board conversation: the second plant was deferred pending the outcome of four interventions.
Phase 3 · Months 2–5
Fix the top four
Changeover reduced from 145 to 42 minutes through a documented SMED routine; the pulper feed conveyor resized for ₹11 lakh; a preventive maintenance calendar with condition monitoring on the two critical pumps; and a CIP schedule change that cut evaporator fouling downtime by two thirds.
Phase 4 · Months 5–9
Make it visible and keep it
Weighbridge and line instruments integrated into the ERP, an hourly production board on the floor, and a ten-metric owner dashboard refreshed nightly. Reporting lag went from nine days to one, and each of the four fixes has a named owner and a control chart.
Measured outcome
The numbers, with their baselines
These are the metrics written into the engagement letter before work started.
31% → 74%
OEE
Measured on the primary line
3.1x
Annual output
Including recovered operating weeks
₹7 Cr
Capex deferred
Second plant no longer required
7.1% → 3.4%
Yield loss
Worth ₹1.4 Cr a year at current volumes
145 → 42 min
Changeover time
Documented SMED routine
9 days → 1 day
Reporting lag
Production MIS
Engagement visual
We had board approval to spend seven crore on a second plant. Anuradha spent four weeks with a clipboard and found most of the second plant inside the first one.
Food Processing
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- Response
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