- \n
- Sanitation, changeovers and shift starts are planned, but rarely measured.<\/li>\n
- Capture each stop automatically, with its reason and its shift.<\/li>\n
- Compare planned and measured durations across shift patterns.<\/li>\n
- Feed measured times back into the next schedule design.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n
Sanitation is a schedule constraint before it is a cleaning task<\/h2>\n
Ethan Franklin, Senior Consultant at Shiftwork Solutions LLC, explains in Shift Scheduling for Food & Beverage Manufacturing: Unique Challenges and Proven Solutions<\/a> why food and beverage plants cannot schedule shifts the way other manufacturers do. He shows how sanitation, product changeovers, temperature constraints and seasonal demand shape the schedule, and argues that sanitation should be designed into the shift pattern from the start, including by cross-training production operators. His point on capacity is blunt: “Every extra hour of sanitation is an hour of lost production capacity.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
His article covers the design side: how a shift pattern should be built around these constraints. This one covers the measurement side. A schedule built around sanitation still relies on assumptions about how long sanitation, changeovers and start-ups actually take. If those assumptions are off, the pattern loses capacity every week without anyone seeing it on a report. Measuring the real duration of each event, on each line and each shift, is what turns a well designed schedule into one that can be checked and adjusted.<\/p>\n
Where food and beverage lines lose time around the schedule<\/h2>\n
In most food and beverage plants, the line time that disappears around the schedule falls into four families. They are usually lumped together as “planned downtime” or “sanitation”, which is exactly why they are hard to manage.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Sanitation windows.<\/strong> The planned cleaning itself, plus everything that stretches it: waiting for the crew, waiting for inspection or swab results, restarting equipment after wash-down.<\/li>\n
- Product changeovers.<\/strong> Flavor, format, allergen or packaging changes. Their duration depends on what ran before, what runs next, and who is available to do the work.<\/li>\n
- Shift starts and handovers.<\/strong> The minutes between the official start of a shift and the moment the line reaches its normal rate: briefing, material checks, first-product checks, settings adjustments.<\/li>\n
- Restarts after long stops.<\/strong> The ramp-up after a weekend, a full sanitation or a long changeover, when the line runs slowly or stops often before it stabilizes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Each of these is legitimate. The problem is not that they exist, but that their real duration is rarely known. A changeover planned as a fixed block can vary widely from one product pair to another and from one crew to another, and a shift start that is supposed to take a few minutes can quietly take much longer on some shifts than on others.<\/p>\n
![\"Four-step](\"https:\/\/teeptrak.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/teeptrak-shiftwork-en.png\")
<\/figure>\nMeasuring each stop: a step by step method<\/h2>\n
The goal is to replace standard times with measured times, event by event, and then compare them across shift patterns. Here is a method that a production or continuous improvement team can run on one line before extending it.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Define the events precisely.<\/strong> Write down where each event starts and ends. For example: sanitation starts when the last product leaves the filler and ends when the first good product is produced after restart. Without shared definitions, two shifts will log the same event in two different ways.<\/li>\n
- Capture every stop automatically, with its timestamp.<\/strong> Manual logs tend to round durations and miss short stops, especially at shift change, when everyone is busy. Automatic capture of line status gives the exact start and end of each stop, including the short ones.<\/li>\n
- Add a simple reason for each stop.<\/strong> Operators qualify stops with a short list of reasons: sanitation, changeover (with the product pair), shift start, waiting for crew, waiting for quality release, restart. Keep the list short enough to be used at every stop.<\/li>\n
- Tag each stop with its shift and shift pattern.<\/strong> Every stop must be attached to the shift and crew on duty, and to the pattern in place at the time (for example, a pattern with sanitation at the end of the last shift versus one with a dedicated sanitation window).<\/li>\n
- Compare planned versus measured, event by event.<\/strong> For each event type, compare the planned duration in the schedule with the measured duration, then look at the spread between shifts, crews and product pairs.<\/li>\n
- Feed the results back into schedule design.<\/strong> Use the measured durations, not the standard ones, when the schedule is reviewed or when a new pattern is tested.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Reading the results by shift pattern<\/h2>\n
Once a few weeks of data are available, the same events can be compared from one shift pattern to another. The table below is an illustration of what such a comparison can look like. The figures are invented for the example and do not describe a real plant.<\/p>\n
- Capture every stop automatically, with its timestamp.<\/strong> Manual logs tend to round durations and miss short stops, especially at shift change, when everyone is busy. Automatic capture of line status gives the exact start and end of each stop, including the short ones.<\/li>\n
- Product changeovers.<\/strong> Flavor, format, allergen or packaging changes. Their duration depends on what ran before, what runs next, and who is available to do the work.<\/li>\n
- Sanitation windows.<\/strong> The planned cleaning itself, plus everything that stretches it: waiting for the crew, waiting for inspection or swab results, restarting equipment after wash-down.<\/li>\n