When it comes to efficiency, there’s more than one way to slay the dragon.

“Almost every year there’s a new buzzword. Right now, we’re into overall operating efficiency (OOE),” said Jim Kline, president, The EnSol Group.

Often, it’s a matter of mathematics to calculate it correctly. Kline prefers to use the operating time on a production line, which he defines as the amount of time that is available to run, minus idle time. That idle time can be lunch breaks, changeovers and a myriad of other stoppages.

OOE should not be confused with overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), which just considers scheduled time. If equipment goes down because of scheduled sanitation or maintenance, OEE ignores this time.

To determine efficiency, bakers should examine the entire line, not just one piece of equipment.

“If you’re working an 8-hour schedule, the line should be running that full 8 hours. Everything that takes away from that time should be categorized as ‘idle time,’ ” Kline  said. “What people fail to realize is that the inefficiency at each point in the process is a multiple of the ones before it.”

In other words, just a small percentage of downtime compounds itself down the line. A 95% efficiency rating from mixing followed by 97% in makeup already reduces the OOE of proofing, baking, cooling, slicing and packaging, even if those downstream systems all operate at 100%.

“If the divider runs out of dough for 2 minutes, it impacts the whole line when it comes to overall operating efficiency,” Kline said. “When you’re measuring how much the line runs, you want to measure it against the ‘opportunity hours’ for it. It gets back to really understanding your true causes of downtime and isolating the problems. If the line were scheduled to be running 8 hours, and production only ran 6.7 hours, what were the real reasons for the downtime?”

Proper scheduling is another way to improve efficiency through longer runs and fewer changeovers. Kline mentioned bakeries that produce frozen baked goods can also rely on inventory to decrease the number of changeovers. A few minutes here and there adds up over a year.

“When you’re talking about the difference between the fresh bakery operation versus frozen, you can look at scheduling long-term and determine how you can use [frozen baked goods inventory] to be most efficient,” he said.

This article is an excerpt from the December 2023 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Operational Efficiency, click here.