Amper Learning Hub
Amper Learning Hub
Improve Late Starts/Early Stops
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Improve Late Starts/Early Stops

What?

Have you ever wondered why it takes so long to get started in the morning? Or have you noticed that some machines stop running well before the end of the shift?

In manufacturing, running your machines within the given shift time is essential. To maximize uptime and profit margins, you'll want to avoid unnecessary late starts and early stops of your equipment.

With Amper, you can measure these late starts and early stops to see, on average, how much time you are losing each week, month, and year. We call these metrics Late Starts and Early Stops. We recommend these projects to our customers when they first get started with Amper as the solutions are typically easy to implement and highly impactful.

Time Commitment: Low

Features Required: Utilization only, but “Time to break idle” must be set in the settings. Set this to the cycle time of your quickest part that runs on the machine.

Notes: Planned downtime does not currently factor into LS/ES. if you have an early shift or OT, might need to filter them out.

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Case Studies:

How?

  1. Collect and Analyze Data:
    2. Review the Article
    Set up a goal for Late Starts/Early Stops in the ⚙️Machine Settings page of the app
    Review your baseline
  2. Calculate Opportunity Cost:
    3. Look at this data for over a month then extrapolate it out to see how many hours you're losing per year and how much it costs using your hourly cost of production. Sometimes you can isolate certain shifts or machine groups that are providing the biggest impact.
  3. Determine Root Cause: Typically, we see these 5 root causes for a late starts and early stops.

      4. 1) Operators not coming in on time

    1. Possible Solution:

      2. 2) Meetings at the start/end of the day

    2. Possible solution: Push meetings to later in the day when the machines are up and running. Additionally, you can have multiple meetings with smaller groups of direct labor staff at a time, so someone can backfill the machines. You can also have meetings before the available shift time.

      3. 3) Cleaning Requirements

    3. Possible solution: Overlap shifts or have employees stay late to run the machines through the available time. You could have 1st shift stay late to clean while 2nd shift starts production or have the last shift stay late to clean after the machines should have been turned off. Calculate how much it costs you to do that, and see if it outweighs what you're loosing.

      4. 4) Long Machine Warm Up Time

    4. Possible solution: Bring someone in 1 hour early in the morning to warm up machines. The cost for the extra hour of labor may be worth the money you're losing not running the machines.

      5. 5) Prepping needing materials for the day/shift at the start of the shift

    5. Possible solution:
  4. Implement a Solution:
    5. Set up an internal project team.
    Determine which solution is best for your business and implement it.
    Monitor your Late Starts/Early Stops with our Amper reports.
    Set up a daily and weekly subscription to these reports
    Hold your team accountable for the improvement.
    Use the Late Start / Early Stop calculator for this project!
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    Download the Calculator here:
    Amper Project Calculator (1).xlsx80.5KB

    **Always check utilization after making the change to see if overall machine utilization goes up in the given available timeframe.