Ancillary departmentsPlant

››
--:--
warming up
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.
01specialist

Forehearth and forming

The other plant-wide team of about four. Owns conditioning and the forming process across all five lines. When a job will not come up to speed, these are the people the shift is waiting on.

02operating

Cold end

Everything after the hot end stacker, and that includes the lehr: conveyors, inspection and the elevators. The largest operating department by area and the one that owns the boundary nobody draws in the right place.

03support

Engineering

The office above the trades: the directory that routes work by the asset that owns it, maintenance planning, and the asset base. The trades are departments of their own.

04support

Store

Spares and consumables, and the re-sort bench where held pallets are gone through by hand.

05specialist

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.

06specialist

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.