Fast Cycle Production

One of the biggest problems in machine oriented processes is associated with how they do their setups. I have worked with companies that, if there were ten machines and ten employees, there would be ten different ways of doing the same setup. In my book, I explain the Team Setup technique that I teach that goes all the way back to 1980 when I first studied the works of Shingeo Shingo in his book on SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies). I will not expand on that here other than to say that if there is a proper way of doing a setup, then everyone should be doing that setup the same way and if someone comes up with an improvement on any part of it, then everyone should benefit from that improvement. Setups are NVA any way you look at them and the faster (and better) that they can be completed, the better off the company will be. It is standard policy for me to say that if it is necessary to reduce setups, I can guarantee that the amount of reduction is no less than 50 percent, and it will happen quickly.

Another problem that I have seen in virtually every company that I have worked with is created on the production floor and usually by supervisors, leads and sometimes engineers. When a problem occurs with counting the number of widgets coming off of the machine or even inspecting the product going into or out of the machine, somebody may decide that the best way to solve the problem is to “temporarily” double count or double inspect. Another example of this is that when a worker makes a mistake the whole department has to do what they call a “buddy check”. Each of these examples is bad for manufacturing and it is likely that they never go away. I have worked with companies that had these things going that were not discovered until they were exposed through process mapping. There are numerous more examples that I could give you and as I said, I have seen them everywhere. The point I want to make is that other than those people actually doing these things, there is nobody else  that knows that many of the problems that are associated with the machines themselves are actually created on the production floor.

I have seen production problems that were actually caused by the engineers that were trying to find a solution to a machine problem. An engineer might go out to the floor and ask a machine operator to take data or just fill out some kind of log (temporarily). I remember talking to an operator that was taking data and when I asked him how long he had been taking that data, he told me that he had been taking it for several months. The data that he was taking had to do with certain “quality” checks. When I approached the engineer, he told me that he didn’t need the data anymore. He looked at the data for about a week and then forgot about it. The reason that I was talking to the operator in that case was because that particular department was the bottleneck department. Crazy but true.