Get your shop floor organised blog IV: Where are our abnormal conditions?

In one my previous blogs, I provided a bird’s eye view on the four quick checks to organise your shop floor. I addressed turning resources into customer value that -in turn- delivers your P&L results. I applied a Gemba walk to observe all this in reality. And I described four guiding questions to look for visible evidence.

The four questions that reveal your level of shop floor control are:

1. What is the next work to take?
2. Are we ahead or behind?
3. Where are our abnormal conditions?
4. Do we solve our daily problems?

In this blog, I take a deeper dive into the third question: where are our abnormal conditions? There are basically three areas to focus on when answering this question.

Materials not meeting standards

Observe where deviating materials are located. Off-spec or questionable finished goods, intermediate products and raw materials should be physically separated from good materials. It should be easy to instantly recognise them as ‘non-useable products’, either by labelling or isolation at a specified location, for instance marked “hospital area”, or “quarantined”. To further prevent mistakes, separation in the administration should follow the visual separation of these materials.

When abnormal materials are separated, observe what is being done with them. What is the process to empty the separation area, to capture learnings and to implement corrective measures? Is there a central place where deviations are discussed with operators, purchasing, and quality staff? Are reason codes assigned, root causes identified and corrective actions followed up? Does this take place at the shop floor to share issues, causes and follow up, or is this activity hidden from view?

Adherence to 5S standards

Everything you see should have a purpose for the work at hand. There should be a dedicated and labelled place for all items with a purpose. This goes the same for a reference, like a picture or a list of items, to compare the workplace to a standard. For more directions on this “5S” approach for a workplace there is abundant info available from any basic Lean source.

Adherence to standard work

Standard work details how to manufacture the product. The description can range from a detailed time stamped step-by-step process with safety and quality relevant issues pointed out to just several bullet points that operators should be aware off. While the first anomaly may well be that such standard work is not available, the real value is in the observation whether standard work is followed in practice. Look at what operators do and compare that to what is described. Often, you will spot abnormal conditions.

Common reasons for not following standard work are:

• lack of training of staff in the application of standard work;
• out-dated standards that are no longer relevant to current equipment, materials, or products;
• improved ways of working that have been developed over time but were never translated into an agreed updated standard work description.

Maybe even more important is to ask your manufacturing manager about how the Gemba walk is done. Is there a schedule for these walks? If so, what does recent adherence to this schedule look like? And if almost all walks have been ticked off as “done”, what were last week’s observations? Be wary about zero deviations reported, especially if you spotted several just now.

Conclusion

Identifying abnormal conditions in product quality, workplace organisation or way of working is an effective way to uncover inefficiencies in running your shop floor. More important than pointing out such deviations is to challenge your manufacturing staff on how they respond to abnormal conditions on a daily basis. Do they effectively solve such problems? And do they demonstrate a culture of trying to discover these themselves? Do they dare to expose without trying to hide? If so, you are in a great place to work.

Vincent Gerdes is Senior Business Process Consultant at R&G Global Consultants in the Netherlands.

Previous blog in this series: Are we ahead or behind?
Next blog:  Do we solve our daily problems?