How does the factory get deliveries started after the holidays without stress or unplanned stops?

Five principles help the factory recover after the holidays:

1. known and agreed capacity,

2. documented and followed-up losses,

3. high-precision daily management around the shutdown,

4. clearly communicated target states for the post-holiday period,

5. active orders in all processes at shutdown with the next order staged.

Factories that work this way shorten the start-up period from weeks to days.

The pattern is familiar in most factories. The period before holidays is characterised by a scramble to meet promised deliveries, every shift, every day, right down to the wire.

The causes behind the stress are well known:

• quality defects,

• maintenance-related stoppages,

• rescheduling,

• customer commitments that do not match the flow's capacity,

• material shortages,

• unpredictable absences.

The last delivery is waved off with pride and the team heads out for a well-deserved break.

The same symptoms recur after the break and hold back both deliveries and good initiatives, often throughout August and well into September. The same thing happens around Christmas and New Year.

This guide examines why this pattern recurs year after year and what it takes to break it.

Why is the post-holiday start-up sluggish year after year?

The start-up is sluggish because the issues present before the break were never resolved, merely paused. The symptoms we see before and after holiday periods can likely be viewed as receipt of all the deviations occurring every day throughout the year. They simply become exceptionally visible during these exact periods. Holidays solve no root causes.

The quality issues, maintenance requirements, and planning deviations that created stress in June remain waiting in August—now reinforced because machines have stood idle, material has not flowed for weeks, and parts of the workforce are still on leave or new.

The extent is larger than most acknowledge. Overall, we see periods of 2 to 6 weeks before the holidays and equally long periods afterwards characterised by our holiday behaviours. This occurs across most operations at two shutdowns per year: summer, as well as Christmas and New Year. A total of 4 to 12 weeks per year—that is, 1 to 3 months annually—where we accept departures from normal operations.

To address this, many attempt to compensate by reducing the holiday shutdown, from a potential four weeks down to three or even two. A better question is the reverse: could we shut down production for a longer period, since more employees are off at the same time? What positive impacts would that have, and what would it require?

Three mechanisms explain most of the sluggishness:

Losses are unknown or undocumented. Many plants know they have losses, but not exactly which ones, how large they are, or where they arise. Without that knowledge, nothing can be resolved during the summer, and autumn begins with the very losses spring ended with.

Capacity is assumed, not known. When planning, sales, and forecasting operate against a capacity that does not match the flow's actual capability, customer promises emerge that production cannot keep. The gap widens faster than most realise. If capacity in the flow is just 5% below planned—and thus committed—capacity, production loses 1 day against plan per month. If the difference between actual capacity and promised planned capacity reaches 20%, the loss equates to one day per week. How do we catch up on lost production? In practice: overtime, extra shifts, contracted labour, replanning, and express freight. What do these recurring, unjustified measures cost? These questions are rarely asked, yet these are precisely the costs driven by the gap between commitment and capability—and the gap is widest precisely when the plant is running at half speed during start-up.

Start-up is guided by gut feeling and wishful thinking rather than facts. The first weeks after the break are when deviations are most frequent and shift experience is often thinnest. Yet that is precisely when follow-up is most sparse. The issue is discovered days or weeks after it has begun inflating costs.

The question is therefore not why the start-up is sluggish. The question is why we allow this condition to recur when the causes can be measured, analysed, and resolved.

Why should the target be the desired state on the first working day after the holiday?

The target should be the desired state on the first scheduled working day after the holiday, because that is when the customer meets the factory again, and this target compels a planned ramp-up rather than a rushed shutdown.

A perspective we often hear is that “we work towards the target of the last production day before the holiday”. The difference in time between the two targets is marginal, or rather non-existent, but fundamentally significant. Anyone aiming for the last day before the shutdown optimises to finish in time. Anyone aiming for the first day optimises to get started—and then prepared orders, staged material, and verified processes become part of the target vision rather than tasks left to wait.

A thought experiment makes the principle clear. If we adopted the perspective that we could go on holiday virtually any day of the year, the phenomenon would likely not occur. A factory ready to be paused and restarted is, by definition, in control of its processes, its orders, and its capacity. Holiday readiness is, in this view, not an annual initiative but proof of day-to-day operational control.

Which five principles make shutdown and start-up controlled?

Five principles make shutdown and start-up controlled and predictable: known capacity, followed-up losses, daily precision, clear target states, and prepared orders.

1. Known and agreed capacity. That you know and agree on your actual capacity, and plan based on this reality and these agreements.

2. Losses are documented and followed up similarly to a White Sheet. That the losses which slowed you down before the break are identified, measured, and tracked forms a continuous foundation for future holiday periods. White Sheet is a specific working method for the entire organisation that standardises and improves practices for ramp-down and ramp-up around holiday periods. Losses are addressed rather than left waiting.

3. High-precision daily management. The final weeks before the holidays and the first days after the holiday period are steered and reviewed daily with high precision and high resolution. Factories working this way shorten the start-up period from weeks to days.

4. Clearly communicated and accepted targets. Targets concern desired states after the holiday, and reviews against these targets begin well ahead of the holiday period. Examples include: utilisation rate, backlog, cleared materials, production sequence, and schedule adherence.

5. Active orders at shutdown, staged for start-up. Aim for all processes across the flow to have active orders at the time of shutdown, ready to resume immediately after the holiday period, and ensure subsequent orders are staged with materials, instructions, tooling, instruments, and the like. This avoids overburdening support functions and prevents departments from competing for the same resources during start-up.

What should be done before the break to ensure a rapid start-up?

The foundation for a controlled and predictable ramp-up is established before the break: prepare the next order per process as far as possible, document losses and working methods that fail, plan interventions for the shutdown, and ensure start-up weeks are scheduled based on actual capacity.

Use the loss analysis as a packing list. An OEE system that has logged stoppages, causes, changeovers, and quality outcomes over spring knows exactly which losses have held back deliveries. Break them down by cause, line, and part number. The largest and most recurring losses are prime candidates for remediation during the holiday shutdown, when maintenance and improvements can be executed without disrupting production. These losses form the foundation of the shutdown and start-up document that underpins improvements ahead of the next holiday period.

Provide maintenance with facts, not gut feelings. The holiday shutdown is the year's best maintenance window, but it only accommodates a fraction of everything that could be done. Data on which technical breakdowns recur, on which machine components, and at what cost allows maintenance efforts to be prioritised based on the failures that genuinely disrupt deliveries. At Sibbhultsverken, technical stoppages dropped by 73% in twelve months precisely because recurring failures were identified in the data and addressed at their root cause.

Reconcile capacity with planning and sales. Before the break is an opportune time to calibrate autumn plans against actual capacity. Actual capacity is not the theoretical speed of the machines, but what the flow genuinely delivers at its current OEE level. A line with an OEE of 55% delivers 55% of its theoretical capacity, and that is the figure customer promises must rest upon until losses are resolved. When sales, planning, and production work from the same fact-based capacity, a large share of rescheduling is eliminated before it even occurs.

How are the start-up weeks best managed?

The start-up weeks are best steered through daily management at a tighter pace than usual, using real-time facts and lower thresholds for flagging deviations. How quickly deviations are identified is now critical.

Hold the morning meeting every day, preferably brief and standing. Yesterday's results against plan, overnight stoppages with causes, and today's risks regarding staffing and materials. During start-up, some plants also introduce a brief midday check-in, as issues occur in quick succession during the opening days.

Let real-time data do the work. Dashboards displaying status against plan allow production management to see within hours if a line falls behind, rather than discovering it at the end of the week. The timeline details exactly what happened overnight, with stoppage reasons coded by the operators who were on site. Andon functions alert maintenance and quality instantly when something requires immediate assistance, ensuring waiting time does not consume shift output.

Verify data quality over the first days. Following an extended shutdown, machine signals, shift patterns, or part master data may have drifted. Check early on that measurement is accurate; otherwise, you will manage by faulty baselines during the weeks you need facts the most.

Lower the barrier to coding and commenting. New or rusty operators are more likely to miss coding downtime. Reinforce why downtime coding matters and keep it simple. A growing “Other” category during start-up serves as an early warning that the analysis is losing its integrity. At Orkla Nidar, the “Other” category disappeared entirely once operators were equipped with tools making it straightforward to code the correct reason immediately.

How do you break the pattern long term?

The pattern is broken when the factory understands its actual capacity, systematically eliminates losses throughout the year, and aligns planning, sales, and production around the same facts. This eliminates both the rush before the holiday and the sluggishness afterwards.

Four questions provide a solid starting point for this review:

Do we know our actual capacity? Not the theoretical, but the measured capacity. If the answer is no, continuous OEE measurement is the first step.

Are we aligned with planning, sales, and forecasting on which capacity to commit to? If production and the sales organisation operate against divergent figures, customer commitments will always fail somewhere—and that typically happens in production, in the weeks preceding a holiday shutdown.

Do we allow sequence deviations in production schedules throughout the year that must be recovered in an unfeasibly short window before the break? Deviations accumulated over months cannot be caught up in a fortnight. The data shows where deviations occur and their scale long before they escalate into a June crisis.

What losses exist in our processes, and do we have a plan to address them over the coming year? That is the core question. A factory that systematically measures, analyses, and rectifies its losses incrementally increases its actual capacity. This narrows the gap between commitment and capability, thereby eliminating both the mad rush and the subsequent backlog.

The answer to all four points in the same direction: begin measuring and monitoring at high resolution, and rely on facts rather than recollection. Kavli, the Norwegian food group, produced 5,000 tonnes more than the previous year without adding shifts or machinery. This proves the capacity was in the plant all along. It became accessible once losses were visualised and resolved.

How does Good Solutions' platform support start-up and capacity optimisation?

Good Solutions' platform is engineered to drive improvement initiatives using facts, which is precisely what a fast start-up demands. The loss analysis identifies, prior to the holidays, which losses can be rectified during a planned summer shutdown. Dashboards and timeline provide daily management with real-time facts throughout the start-up weeks. The operator interface ensures stoppage reasons are coded precisely when they occur, even by new or temporary personnel. Reports provide planning, sales, and management with a unified view of the actual capacity against which production operates.

Two elements are especially relevant for factories seeking to break the start-up pattern. Good Solutions' Restart Programme is a five-day programme that secures data quality, verifies machine signals, builds competence across roles, and establishes a clear structure for continuous improvement—exactly what a plant needs after an operational lull. The OEE Policy Workshop gathers decision-makers and key personnel for a half-day session to define and document what is measured and how, creating the foundation for planning, sales, and production to work towards the same capacity metrics.

The pattern among successful factories is identical: start-up is rapid when losses are known, capacity is measured, and the initial weeks are steered by facts.

See further examples of results from various manufacturing sites here.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a post-holiday start-up take?
With prepared actions, verified data quality, and fact-based daily management, production should return to standard operating rates within a few days to a week. If the start-up routinely consumes all of August, it indicates that root causes have not been resolved.

What is most critical to do before the holidays?
Three actions.

1. Use loss analysis to identify the largest and most frequent losses.

2. Prioritise shutdown maintenance and improvement tasks based on this list.

3. Align autumn planning and sales against actual, measured capacity rather than theoretical figures.

How do we determine our actual capacity?
Through continuous OEE tracking. Actual capacity equals theoretical capacity multiplied by actual OEE. A line operating at 55% OEE delivers 55% of its theoretical capacity, and that is the figure schedules and customer promises must be built upon until losses are eliminated.

Why is pushing harder during the weeks after the break insufficient?
Because pushing harder does not address underlying root causes. Forcing throughput with unchanged losses produces identical results, alongside increased stress, elevated scrap, and a higher risk of fresh breakdowns. Capacity is unlocked by eliminating losses, not by straining the same flow harder.

We have lost momentum in our OEE initiatives over the year. How do we restart?
Begin by verifying data quality, as confidence in the figures underpins everything else. Next, re-establish daily management using brief meetings centred on production facts, and select 2 to 3 prioritised losses to tackle first. A structured reboot, such as Good Solutions' five-day Restart Programme, provides a clear framework for the process, ensuring data, competence, and standard operating procedures are aligned concurrently.