Machine availability up 117% at Nutriex, from 45% to 97.7%

The challenge

Nutriex manufactures health, hygiene and protection products. The company marked 25 years in business in 2025 and is present in more than 20 countries besides Brazil, with a portfolio of over 300 products across its own and licensed brands, workplace safety and hospital lines.

Rapid growth in volume and portfolio exposed processes that had never been fully optimized. Microstops were eroding equipment performance, and the production chain was not ready to keep pace with the strategies the company was adopting.

A broad mix is normal in cosmetics, and it is manageable only when processes are aligned. At Nutriex, most of the shop floor still ran on paper and spreadsheets. Records were prone to errors and omissions, so efficiency could not be assessed with any confidence.

Management had no consistent view of performance, availability, capacity or efficiency across the production flow. The information needed to run the plant, and to find room to grow, stayed hidden inside the process. Without that transparency, there was no reliable way to follow day-to-day production or to prove that an improvement had worked.

The solution

Nutriex needed accurate, real-time shop-floor data that managers and operators could both act on. Some employees had already worked with Cogtive at other plants, which simplified the selection and shortened the learning curve. After onboarding training, Cogtive was brought into every stage of the routine:

• Indicators on shop-floor screens. Line data is visible to everyone involved in the operation, and each shift starts by reviewing where production stands.
• Daily management meetings. Operational data drives the discussion, which leads to faster fixes, sharper priorities and a steady cadence of continuous improvement.
• OEE analysis and kaizen. The OEE foundation, with real OEE and the downtime Pareto on the equipment dashboard, exposed stops that lasted longer than necessary and microstops that had gone unnoticed. Each one became the starting point for a kaizen and an action plan. The resulting process adjustments also reduced wear on machine components.

The starting point was below expectations: OEE averaged 31% at best, and microstops were the main obstacle to the equipment’s expected performance and availability. Once the problems were identified and the solutions mapped, management set a target of a 19-percentage-point OEE increase within 30 days. The plan combined four moves:

• reallocating labor;
• standardizing the flow from sequencing through to packaging;
• building out the production flow in Cogtive’s digital kanban, now Flow View;
• monitoring machine stability.

The results

With losses measured instead of estimated, the team could attack the right stops in the right order:

• Machine availability rose from 45% to 97.7%, a 117% increase.
• Process performance went from 68.8% to 84.54%.
• OEE now averages 50%, against a best average of 31% at the start of the project.

The gain came from a daily discipline: microstops made visible on the Pareto, discussed at the daily meeting and addressed with an action plan. Operators and managers now work from one set of numbers they trust, rather than from paper records reconciled after the fact.

What’s next

Nutriex now has production processes that are standardized, efficient and replicable across other plants. The expected rise in demand can be absorbed more easily, with fewer errors and fewer losses caused by inefficiency. Opportunities that unreliable data used to hide are now visible, and the plant is better positioned to grow on that basis.