I remember the Ford commercials when I was younger: Quality is Job 1. It was probably the first memory I have of trying to understand why a business chased quality. There was a sense of pride in it at a time when American car manufacturers started really paying attention to the sale of cars in the US. While Japanese cars had been in the US since the late 50’s, it wasn’t until environmental concerns and gas consumption (price wars) really drove the purchase that things started to feel more competitive and, by 1980 when the Ford commercial came out, 2 million Japanese cars a year were sold in North America.

For me, quality was a newer concept. At the time, I didn’t have an understanding of cheap versus expensive, high versus low quality. Call it age or innocence, I wasn’t really paying attention to that. At the time, my version of quality was school grades.

Now, quality is something we all consider when we’re buying things, whether for you business or your personal life. There’s always the temptation of buying online or buying from overseas, where you can get a cheaper price. But there’s a quality component that you are always trading if you’re buying for price. They go hand-in-hand.

And so it is with manufacturing. You trade quality and price. Is there a different way?

PRODUCTION OPERATIONS

Your Production Operations team is your top expense. They have to be. Even where we see raw materials (think carbon composite or titanium) as a key expense for a business, the people portion of that equation is always high. The more expensive your components, materials and ingredients are, the higher the cost sometimes, as you need to find more experienced or qualified people to do the work and protect your inventory investment.

If you believe or assume that this is the case, is there a way to protect that investment and make it work for you? We believe so.

If you want the value of your Production Operations team to become your greatest asset in terms of performance, we believe you must provide them with the right tools for that job. And we’re not talking about actual tools here. They will naturally have the tools they need to do the work. We’re exercising our “quality muscles” here and asking you to give them real-time access to the information they need to do their jobs.

PRODUCTION CONTROL

For us, Production Control starts with and ends with your Production Operations team. It is in giving them the information, tools, and systems to do their work that you can accelerate the work that’s being done. Let me give you a great example. In both the food industry and in the carbon industry, there is an “art more than science” part of the process. These can be driven by things like weather (think more humidity in the plant during production driving the need to adjust the recipe) or even by the work being done (think composites struggling with dust or dirt and needing to be cleaned post-process).

In situations like this, manufacturers we work with can point to individual, common processes or issues that they run into. These are things that they wish to track and solve as quickly as possible and the system we often see them rely on is a person (or persons) that run around, literally, solving problems for the team all day long. If you stand back and watch this happen, the person they select is both critical to the problem-solving and quite unnecessary at the same time.

He or she becomes unnecessary the moment you find a common issue that they solve that you can get to a different way. Perhaps you provide the team with written instructions on common issues and how to solve them. I’m remembering here a manufacturer that had written out their top 10 issues and what to do when the operators ran across them. These were laminated and posted on the workstations. Perhaps you provide them quicker access to approved paths. Whether you give them decision-making ability or require them to ask for assistance when they run into issues, rapid solutions drive your costs down. The longer it takes to solve the problem, the more cost you’re running into. This is people cost, production cost and materials as well. You need to be efficient at problem-solving to contain your expense.

step one: count it

The first thing we want you to do is track and count the issues. See what your common problems are, count them and start remediating them. We want you to do this over a period of time and focus. The first step in that is creating a list.

Build a list of all your common quality issues. These could be catastrophic failures (must scrap the job and start over) or resolvable ones. We want you to list them all and then categorize them by severity. Once you have that list broken down, apply a common solution to everything on the list. For instance, you may require that top-level problems require a certain series of steps to solve and must have a sign-off by a supervisor to ensure the problem has been solved before the work goes on. Meet with your team and describe the different routes as well as how they are to solve them.

It is in these meetings that you can increase both the trust between yourself and the team and the value you instill in them to do their job. I’m getting back to the Ford quote from earlier here. Make them believe that quality is important but tell them the role they must play in it and where they can make their own decisions on that quality. You are putting the very decision on what they do into their hands, and they will respect you when you respect them.

Next week, we’ll talk a little further about quality and how to resolve things for good. Until then, spend some time assessing the visibility, productivity, and flexibility you have into and with your team.  Push the Connect button to learn about how we help teams with this.  Or, if you have a question, reach out to info@cimx.com.  We are here to help you save money, time and get your Production under Control. 

Contact CIMx Software to see how a Manufacturing Execution System can improve production control for you.