JA Saúde Animal Cuts Machine Downtime by 70% with Cogtive
JA Saúde Animal specializes in the research, development, and manufacturing of veterinary products and medicines. A benchmark in Brazil’s livestock sector, the pharmaceutical company also sells its products abroad.
The company was founded in 2002 to meet growing demand within Brazil, respecting the specific characteristics and needs of the country’s livestock industry. Its research and formulation development, however, date back to the 1990s, when it obtained its first registrations with regulatory agencies. To this day, JA Saúde Animal remains focused on innovation in this field, developing new formulations and improving its products.
The Challenge
JA Saúde Animal had little visibility into what was happening on the shop floor, lacking up-to-date, reliable indicators to support management in making sound strategic decisions. Numerous inefficiencies went unnoticed and had a deep impact on production.
Average wait time on some machines reached 33 minutes a day, adding up to more than 18 hours over 60 days. A stoppage this long ate into the equipment’s availability to absorb a larger production volume. In an industry where every second counts, like pharmaceuticals, those precious lost minutes create an exponential impact across the production chain.
On another production line, setups turned out to be longer than they should have been, reaching up to 6 hours. This pointed to inefficiency in the task and an opportunity to make the process leaner and more precise. Combined with the wait times, it created an even greater impact on machine availability and prevented a more varied production mix.
It was only after implementing Cogtive that management and operators were able to understand the root cause of these problems.
The Solution
What was once hidden within the operation, Cogtive unlocked and made accessible to everyone on the shop floor. Information collected directly from the equipment could now be processed and used to build continuous improvement strategies. As we’ll see below, JA Saúde Animal gained visibility into every stage of the production process, identifying opportunities and gaining the tools needed to act on them.
Cogtive’s implementation began in the first half of 2023 across two industrial units, applying automatic and semi-automatic data collection. Around 150 SKUs are currently monitored and made available on the platform for real-time access.
Building a Custom Dashboard
Having data isn’t enough if it isn’t made available for the responsible teams to work with. Cogtive makes it possible to build custom dashboards that bring the most critical information together in one place. This way, information reaches the people responsible for decision-making, allowing it to be processed and turned into action plans.
At JA Saúde Animal, the data collected is used in weekly performance meetings with a multidisciplinary team to quickly resolve problems and improve operational processes. It also makes it possible to track production progress in less time, showing operators what and how much each shift is delivering.
Monitor machine performance and production progress closely, all in one place.
The custom dashboard used by JA Saúde Animal included information such as Effective OEE, equipment timeline, quantity produced, and more.
Screenshot of the Cogtive Equipment Dashboard (Real OEE, Pareto, FIFO, Status, OEE History, Maintenance, Speed, Setup)
Once it becomes possible to see, in real time, how planned output compares with actual output, operators gain the autonomy to act in favor of improving productivity. In other words, they can tell whether the day’s plan will be met before the shift ends.
This visibility highlighted the need for standardization across shifts, which previously had harmful variations in productivity — the kind that, over time, created the very inefficiencies that led to Cogtive’s implementation.
The Operational Excellence team played a key role in ensuring this wealth of data reached every corner of the plant.
In early 2024, training sessions were developed for the operational team at both plants, making clear how to use the data reliably and achieve the expected results. The custom dashboard was implemented to meet this need for greater transparency and visibility.
Túlio Harati, Operational Excellence Coordinator
“We explained how to access the data and interpret what was being shown on screen. For example, if the OEE indicator was below expectations, what kind of impact that would have on the operation and how to minimize it. Data entries were standardized and also became more accurate.”
— Túlio Harati, Operational Excellence Coordinator
Results
Reduced Equipment Downtime
Viewing equipment availability through the timeline showed that wait time before production start on a given line was far too high. In total, that meant 18.5 fewer hours of production over 60 days due to machine downtime. This raised a red flag for management.
Armed with this information, managers were able to feed internal spreadsheet models to assess the current performance of the production flow. This made it possible to find the right action plan to achieve the expected results, using resources efficiently and making the most of installed capacity.
The result was a 69.7% reduction in equipment wait time over a 60-day period. This improvement is also confirmed by Cogtive’s data, which displays performance intuitively through charts and detailed breakdowns.
Setups Became More Efficient
Another parameter found to be out of line was setup time. In an industry with as broad a production mix as pharmaceuticals, setups need to be fast and efficient to keep the operation sustainable.
Setups were taking an average of 7 hours to complete, representing a significant amount of machine downtime. Management used the data collected by Cogtive to apply the SMED method to reduce this time as much as possible.
Through these improvement processes, setups were reduced to a standard average of 4 hours and 20 minutes — a 30% gain in machine availability from a leaner setup.
Increased Equipment Performance
With improvements implemented end-to-end across the plant’s operation, it was possible to achieve significant growth in OEE. Since the start of 2024, equipment performance has increased by 25%. That means more production in less time, using the full potential of already-installed production resources.
Operators now have a clear, realistic target to direct their efforts toward, allowing them to draw out the full potential installed on the shop floor.
Machine indicators are accessible in real time on Cogtive’s dashboards, wherever you are.
With Cogtive, JA Saúde Animal has been able to transform its operational management to focus on excellence and continuous improvement. Operational data turned into strategic meetings and proven results within a short time. Each area accesses the indicators most relevant to its routine and works from them to ensure consistent productivity. Targets are met more efficiently, saving both time and resources.
COGTIVE
Cogtive is a SaaS (Software as a Service) company expanding productivity potential in the manufacturing industry, uncovering hidden capacity on the production line, changing the way leaders see the shop floor, increasing production efficiency, and impacting business results. Built on IoT and Artificial Intelligence, our software drastically reduces line stoppages, improves productivity rates, optimizes the time of operators and managers, and enables factories to reach peak performance.
