What KPIs are needed for a food manufacturing company?

A key step in any performance improvement project is selecting the correct Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are the variables that businesses in any industry can use to assess, analyze and track their processes in order to evaluate success in relation to goals.
​
KPIs vary depending on the industry, organization, and hundreds of other factors. However, when it comes to food production, there are several common manufacturing KPIs as given below: 

​1. Count:

Possibly the most obvious, and often most important metric is the amount of product produced – whether that’s between changeovers, per shift, daily or even weekly. As well as giving a clear overview of the performance of the line, the amount of quality products produced per shift or per day can even be used to invoke a competitive spirit among employees and improve their focus.

2. Reject Ratio:

Production processes occasionally produce scrap, which in this industry can be measured in a simple way by recording the weight of waste and turning it into a reject ratio of weight/volume of goods or value of goods produced. Minimising scrap helps organisations increase their bottom line, so it is important to track whether or not the amount being produced is within acceptable limits.

3. Rate:

Machines and processes produce goods at variable rates – too slow and profits will be reduced; too fast and quality could be affected. A correctly measured operating rate KPI can help make production more consistent and helps give the production team production output targets.

4. Cycle Time:

Cycle time can be measured as the time taken to complete a particular task. This could be the time it takes to produce a product, or the cycle time of specific operations. In food industry many products are made in batches and this is a great metric to highlight the constraints or bottlenecks within a process.

5. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE):

This is a way of looking at the use of each equipment asset within production. How many hours per day do we use each machine? When we use it are we using it efficiently? What can we do to make better use of each machine? OEE multiplies availability by performance and quality to determine resource utilisation.

6. Downtime:

Downtime may be a result of a breakdown or simply a machine changeover. When machines are not operating, money isn’t being made so reducing downtime is a way to directly increase profitability, and tracking the reasons why downtime occurs can help to protect against future losses.

​Although these are general KPIs, they can be a useful starting point for an improvement project in food production.