Productivity Gains in Swab Manufacturing, 1998 Nonwovens Conference Proceedings

Swab manufacturing is an ideal end use for cotton in nonwovens. It uses cotton by-product fibers such as low end short virgin fibers, mill wastes, and comber noils that are unacceptable in conventional spinning. Furthermore, the manufacturing process reworks wastes, and recycles the rejected fibers until all fibers are consumed into making swabs. Of the 66.3 million pounds of cotton used annually in nonwovens in the United States, a significant 8.6 million pounds are used in swab production, which in monetary terms generates 1.5 billion dollars.

Because of increasing global competition from low-wage labor nations, cost-cutting, and increasing productivity have become perpetual challenges in swab manufacturing in the United States. This paper describes technical details of swab manufacturing, and categorizes causes for the machine down time to increase the machine productivity. The paper discusses the application of the Pareto technique that solved down time and inefficiency problems at a leading U. S. healthcare products manufacturing company resulting in high machine efficiency and high quality swabs. This technique can be used by any manufacturing operation to accomplish ongoing improvements.