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OpX Work Products: From Concept to Implementation

FSO’s 12 Dimensions of Manufacturing Health and OpX work products combine to help solve challenges that include total cost of ownership, overall equipment effectiveness, asset reliability, workforce engagement, and more.

Table 1: 12 Dimensions of Manufacturing Health
Table 1: 12 Dimensions of Manufacturing Health

For more than a decade, PMMI’s OpX Leadership Network has provided an ongoing forum for consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers and their suppliers to share, discuss, and solve significant challenges they face in pursuit of operational excellence. As a result, more than 20 best-practice process improvement documents have been published to aid in workforce engagement, total cost of ownership (TCO), overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), factory acceptance tests (FATs), requests for proposals (RFPs), remote equipment access, and hygienic equipment design, just to name a few.

From the beginning, CPGs and suppliers participating in the OpX Leadership Network sought to create guidance documents that would not be treated as white papers sitting on a shelf collecting dust. They wanted them to be dynamic, actionable documents that could actually improve day-to-day operations. The documents, therefore, needed to be adopted and integrated into production operations in order to derive their full benefit. This approach made both the documents and the OpX Leadership Network developing them unique. It explains, in large part, why the PMMI-convened OpX Leadership Network endures more than a decade after its inception.

While the development of these guidance documents provided a roadmap for CPGs and their suppliers, it left unanswered guidance on how these documents could be implemented, especially for CPGs, many of which were still dealing with the “thinning” or downsizing of their respective operations. Several looked to the FSO Institute, an outsource service provider, to help them implement OpX Leadership Network work products. In a short time, the FSO Institute and OpX Leadership Network developed the 12 Dimensions of Manufacturing Health, which, in part, address the implementation of OpX Leadership Network work products. To ensure an ongoing opportunity for continued dialogue around the implementation of these and other solutions, the FSO Institute formed the Manufacturing Health Roundtable (MHRT), which now has more than 30 CPG members.

Op Xchart Orange

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Case 1: It’s on the schedule, so why isn’t it happening? 

Here is a frequent CPG refrain: Production is scheduled and put on the calendar for all to see, but when blending, packaging, etc., occur, there are often components missing. This causes loss of production line utilization, increased man-hours, missed on-time shipments, and customer complaints. The solution seems to be scheduling, but are there underlying causes not identified?

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