Forehearth and forming
The other plant-wide team of about four. Owns conditioning and the forming machines across all five lines. When a job will not come up to speed, these are the people the shift is waiting on.
Melbourne Works · plant support
Production is one customer. These are the departments that serve it.
Support work is not a footnote under the plant diagram. Each department owns a queue, a capacity constraint and a hand-off back to a line.
Operating ruleEnter by department; return to the affected line.
Cold end
Everything after the hot end stacker — and that includes the lehr. Conveyors, inspection, elevators, the pack centre and the palletisers. The largest operating department by area and the one that owns the boundary nobody draws in the right place.
Engineering
Three trades that get counted as one department and behave as three: electrical, forming machine, and plant maintenance. The mould shop and the compressor house sit here.
Store
Spares and consumables, and the re-sort bench where held pallets are gone through by hand.
Batch and furnace
A plant-wide team of about four. Owns the batch house, both furnaces, the regenerators and the cullet return — everything upstream of the forehearth, plus the loop that comes back underneath.
Job change
Splits into hot end and cold end job change, because a changeover is two jobs happening on one line at once. The moulds come out at one end while the cold end is reset for different ware at the other.
Synthetic operating model · departments, workload and all displayed values are fictional.