Angram’s headquarters in Thirsk have taken on a new industrial role and are now dedicated to the production of metal dispense towers and taps for prestigious international beer brands.

Backed by eighteen assembly lines, some of which are dedicated to individual clients, its production capacity can reach up to 8,000 units of draft tower and 25,000 taps per month. But what type of major changes have taken place at the historical headquarters? The original manufacturing process was organised into islands that delivered a high level of variability according to the abilities of individual workers as they carried out specific assembly tasks, without considering two essential types of input: daily takt time, which is closely linked to the daily demand from clients, and the assembly rate of each station.

The restructuring of the production process, based on daily takt time of fifty units per day, has completely overturned the previously-used methodology, assigning each worker a specific sequence of tasks in order to balance out the time spent at each station, ensuring constant output and drastically reducing wait times between stations. With this change, we’ve gone from eight to three assembly stations and thus, overall, from a production cell organised into islands to a layout of five lines. This has also made it possible for us to build a stable, repetitive one-piece-flow process.

Today, total production times have been reduced and are now once again in line with what was estimated during the planning phase. This reorganisation will help recoup production capacity and respond more efficiently to customer requests.

Discover the case study behind the customized project of the new beer tap tower for Bellhaven. Angram was approached to design and develop a new draft beer column for Belhaven Best and Best Extra Cold, designed alongside Belhaven's marketing team.