Case study · Toosalem Industrial · Operations
Scaling a production line 8×
I took monthly output from 3,000 to 25,000 units by designing a new production line and changing how three shifts worked together. Efficiency rose 40%, material waste fell 26% and unplanned downtime fell 18%.
- Role
- Production Manager
- Team
- ~80 people, 3 shifts
- Worked with
- Engineering, foundry, HR, supply chain
- Result
- 3,000 → 25,000 units a month
The situation
Toosalem is an automotive manufacturer. I ran production: about 80 people across three shifts, working closely with engineering, the foundry, HR and the supply chain.
The problem
The existing line and shift structure could not produce anywhere near the volume the business needed. Pushing the existing setup harder would only have added waste and downtime.
What I did
- Designed a new production line and rebuilt the flow of work around it.
- Restructured the three shifts and reengineered the processes between them.
- One plan across departments. Engineering, the foundry, HR and the supply chain worked from the same plan and the same numbers.
- Root causes, not symptoms. Data on waste and downtime pointed to root causes, and a preventive maintenance program dealt with them before they stopped the line.
- Software where manual tracking failed. Two internal systems replaced manual tracking for packaging and maintenance, described in the next case study.
“A small knot in a process becomes a serious blocker at scale.”
Results
What I learned
Throughput, quality and waste are measurable in software too. I still plan sprints the way I learned to plan a production line: find the bottleneck first.