Continuous Success Because you can’t have continuous success without continuous improvement
Continuous improvement has always been an integral part of the lean manufacturing process, but it’s especially important in a space that is as competitive as the food and beverage industry.
Not only do you have to worry about more and more competitors cropping up on a daily basis, but you also have ever-changing rules and regulations at the state and federal level to concern yourself with. Every day, the tightrope that you’re being asked to walk seems to get thinner and thinner – you’re supposed to focus on all of these things, all while still maintaining peak efficiency and quality across your lines at the same time.
Equally complicating things is the fact that in the food and 
beverage industry in particular, you have to constantly worry about the “public health and safety” aspect of it all. In another industry if your widget isn’t up to quality, a product doesn’t work quite right, and a customer is upset. In food and beverage if that quality level isn’t there, you can literally make someone sick.
This is all a big part of the reason why, at Thrive, we’ve worked hard to develop a solution that brings you the real-time data and reporting insight you need when you need it the most. Our solution isn’t just a great way to help your company reduce downtime and increase efficiency – it’s built to help you meet (or exceed) production goals all while meeting your rigid quality requirements as well.
WHY TRACKING MATTERS
Again, downtime tracking for your business is about more than just figuring out why and when a machine isn’t running because of something that wasn’t planned – although make no mistake, that is a big (and important) part of it.
If you can track downtime, you have everything you need to start tracking performance. Once you have total visibility into your performance, you have complete control over the quality of your output. Some people call the answer to the equation “Downtime + Performance + Quality” OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Here, we have a different name for it:
Thrive.
Yes, achieving that perfect level of these three factors is very difficult because there are so many moving parts. But at the same time, the stakes in your business are incredibly high. According to the World Health Organization, almost one in 10 people fall ill after eating contaminated food every year. 420,000 of them die. $110 billion is lost every year in productivity and medical expenses resulting from unsafe food alone – and that is not a situation you want to find yourself on the wrong end of.
But luckily, we find that the top 20% of downtime-related issues are approximately 80% of the problem for a business like yours. And at Thrive, we’ve designed our solution to help tackle every single one of them.
The Thrive Approach
At Thrive, we’ve always been of the opinion that downtime and quality tracking is only as difficult as people make it – and we’ve built an entire solution as a way of proving it.
Case in point: we’ve designed our machine downtime tracking and OEE management software to be so easy that literally anyone in your business could use it. Whether you’re talking about someone who has been with you since the beginning or who just walked onto the factory floor for the first time last week, it doesn’t matter – you don’t need an engineering or computer science degree to leverage what we’ve built for your business.
In fact, we don’t actually offer training of any kind. It’s our opinion that if we have to actually train you on how to use our software, we didn’t build it right in the first place.
What you’re left with is an incredibly intuitive, exceptionally easy way to track downtime, performance and quality that is known as being the most straightforward solution in the industry, hands down. This of course gives way to the most important benefit of all: an opportunity to put technology to work for your business in a way that lets you worry less on factors like potential quality issues and micro starts and stops, all so that you can focus on those matters that actually need your undivided attention.
So if you’d like to find out more information about how Thrive’s innovative machine downtime tracking and OEE management software was built with the specific needs of the food and beverage industry in mind, or if you’d just like to speak to someone about your own needs so that you can get this journey started right away, please don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and contact your friends at Thrive today.
