Equipment wait time down 69.7% in 60 days at JA Saúde Animal

The challenge

JA Saúde Animal researches, develops and manufactures veterinary products and medicines. A benchmark in Brazil’s livestock sector, the company also sells its products abroad. It was founded in 2002 to meet growing demand in Brazil, but its research and formulation work dates back to the 1990s, when it obtained its first registrations with regulatory agencies. Innovation in new formulations remains at the center of the business.

On the shop floor, management had little visibility. There were no up-to-date, reliable indicators to support strategic decisions, and numerous inefficiencies went unnoticed while eating into production.

Two of them carried most of the weight. On one line, machines waited far too long before production started, and those hours were lost to the capacity the plant needed to absorb a larger volume. On another line, setups took much longer than they should have, a sign of an inefficient task and a clear opportunity to make the changeover leaner and more precise. Together, the waiting and the long setups cut machine availability and held back a more varied production mix. In pharmaceutical manufacturing, where every minute of availability counts, the effect compounds across the production chain.

The root cause of both problems only became clear once Cogtive was in place.

The solution

Implementation began in the first half of 2023 across two industrial units, with automatic and semi-automatic data collection from the equipment. Around 150 SKUs are monitored today, with data available in real time.

The OEE foundation was configured into a custom dashboard that brings the critical information into one place: effective OEE, the equipment timeline, quantity produced and more. The dashboard feeds weekly performance meetings with a multidisciplinary team, where problems are resolved quickly and operating processes improved. It also shows operators what each shift is delivering and how much.

Seeing planned output against actual output in real time gives operators the autonomy to act: they know whether the day’s plan will be met before the shift ends. The same visibility exposed productivity variations between shifts, the kind that, over time, had created the inefficiencies that led to the project, and made the case for standardizing work across shifts.

JA Saúde Animal’s own Operational Excellence team made sure the data reached every corner of the plant. In early 2024, training sessions for the operational teams at both plants made clear how to use the data reliably and reach the expected results, and the custom dashboard answered the need for more transparency across the floor.

The results

Equipment wait time down 69.7%. The equipment timeline showed that the wait before production start on one line was far too high: 18.5 hours of production lost over 60 days. Managers fed this data into internal models of the production flow, chose an action plan that made efficient use of resources and installed capacity, and cut equipment wait time by 69.7% over a 60-day period. Cogtive’s charts and detailed breakdowns confirm the improvement.

Setups standardized at 4 hours 20 minutes. Using the setup times recorded by Cogtive, management applied the SMED method to shorten changeovers on the line where they had run long. Setups now follow a standard average of 4 hours and 20 minutes, a 30% gain in machine availability from a leaner setup. In a production mix as broad as pharmaceuticals, that time goes straight back to production.

Equipment performance up 25%. With improvements applied end to end across the operation, OEE grew significantly. Since the start of 2024, equipment performance has increased by 25%: more output in less time from production resources that were already installed. Operators now work toward a clear, realistic target.

Operational data now drives strategic meetings and measurable results. Each area works from the indicators most relevant to its routine, and targets are met with less time and fewer resources.