Field exercise: time and record a slaughter day on the pace sheet

This lesson is part of Slaughterhouse and processing specialisation. It opens to every registered student, from free registration. Levels 1 to 5 and the tracks remain readable by everyone.

You always think you know where the unit loses its time: "it is the plucker", "it is the evisceration guy", "it is the ice arriving late". Until you have timed it, these are opinions. This exercise has you spend a whole day with a watch, a notebook and the pace sheet: you will count the chickens at each station hour by hour, record every stoppage with its cause and duration, measure the waiting times between steps, then read the result to find the real bottleneck and decide on a quantified correction. It is the exercise you redo every month, and it is what takes a unit from 70 to 100 chickens an hour without buying a machine.

• ✓Prepare the equipment and the pace sheet, and choose the counting points of a slaughter day
• ✓Record hour by hour the chickens passed at each point, the stoppages and their causes, the waiting times and the temperatures
• ✓Calculate the real pace of each station, the total time of the day and the time lost, and name the bottleneck
• ✓Draw from the sheet a concrete, measurable correction, to be checked at the next recording

1. Why time it, and when
2. Equipment and preparation
3. The complete pace sheet
4. Reading the result: paces, bottleneck, time lost
5. Deciding the correction and checking it
6. Going further

• •The complete pace sheet is done once a month and at every change, on an ordinary day, without warning; the manager does nothing else.
• •Five cumulative counters (bled, plucked, pass-through, iced water, bagged) read at every hour on the hour in the same order, plus the waiting stocks between the points and the temperatures; a table of stoppages (time, station, duration, cause); the day's totals.
• •Reading: hourly pace = difference of cumulatives; day's pace = chickens ÷ (last cone − first cone); bottleneck = where the waiting stock is the largest and most constant; time lost = stoppages of the bottleneck; quality incidents go to the control plan.
• •Correction small, precise, measurable, written with who does it and how it is checked at the next recording; reread the correction to check that it respects the forward flow.
• •Three pitfalls: counting twice, reading the counters at different times, looking for a culprit instead of recording the cause.