The Total Eclipse (on your shop floor)

You must have heard by now. There will be a total solar eclipse on Monday, April 8^th. We are lucky to be in the path of near totality, so we don’t have to travel far to see it. The sky will be black. The temperature will drop. I’ve heard that the moments just before totality will be louder than usual, with wild animals making more noise than usual. And, at the height, it will be pin-cushion quiet.   These things are out of our control and will happen whether we’re there or not.

How is this like your shop floor? Have you ever heard the moments before something goes wrong? Things are starting to pull apart, start to have issues. The team gathers around to try to figure it out and do whatever it takes to self-correct. We’ve talked about the rhythm of the shop before. Shops have a sound, a feeling.

An aside. When we started CIMx, it felt like we were starting to launch an animate thing, rather than something without life. I’ve grown to learn that all companies have a “heartbeat” – that feeling that you get when you enter them. It’s not what’s printed on the walls. It’s not what’s on their website. It’s what they tell you. How they act. What they do for you. A company is its culture.

PRODUCTION OPERATIONS

The shop floor is like that. It also has a beat. It has a sound. A usual feeling. Some shop floors that I’ve been on are noisy and there’s a lot of movement. Everyone seems to be moving somewhere, getting something, active. Other shops have operators mostly confined to their work centers. All the materials they need to do their work are delivered and they do their work throughout the day.

Whatever the pulse of your shop and however noisy (or quiet) it is, you can literally hear the difference when something’s going wrong. For quiet shops, this may be that the amount of noise may increase dramatically around the area with the issue. For noisier shops, my experience is that the activity level in those areas rise and you can see the difference before you hear it.

PAPERLESS OPERATIONS

So how does paperless manufacturing help? How can digitizing your shop do anything to help with the issues you have?

Paperless doesn’t always help. At least not all paperless systems do. There are a few critical things a paperless manufacturing system needs to have to be helpful to you in this case. You need to have a production schedule that shifts and changes real-time. It needs to process the issue that just happened (or is happening) and plan for the right contingency. It should give you the flexibility to override the decisions it’s making on your behalf. It should allow you to split work up – if you’re having a problem and have to move work, you may not be able to send 100% of that work to one person to squeeze in.

Paperless manufacturing is most helpful when it behaves like your right-hand. It allows you to see what’s there (and not) and adjusts with it. Back to that eclipse we’re going to be seeing in a few short weeks – it’s like the backside of that. The shadow should cross the sun and then come off the other side. So you can see again.

Our goal is to give your team the tools they need to track your numbers, report on them, analyze and archive them.  Push the Get a Demo button to learn about how we help teams with this. 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.