Reversing

If you’re in a car, you know that you have a reverse gear. Everyone knows what it does. You might use it to get out of (or into) a parking spot, your driveway, or your garage. Every now and again, you may use it for a K turn or to get out of a wrong turn. Few, if any of you (I had a cousin once, long story) would ever use it to drive. Yet there it sits on your gear box.

No one ever tells you (or at least I don’t remember getting direction on) not using it for driving. In driver’s ed, they don’t say “reverse is not used for driving on the highway”. Or a road for that matter. You just know. It makes sense.

Production Operations

You have a way that you know you need to do things. It’s the way you want your team to do the work at hand. You give them instructions (either written or verbal) and maybe you check on them to make sure they’re doing it correctly. There are things that are available to them that you don’t tell them not to do, but you surely hope they don’t.

You give them a tool to attach to a machine for use. It’s heavy and metal. It could be used as a hammer (if they needed one), but it most certainly should not. Machine tools are expensive. And sometimes more delicate than they look. When something doesn’t quite fit at the workbench and your employee decides that a blunt force is what they need to loosen, tighten or complete the insertion of something, how many different objects do they have at their disposal to do that (which you do not want them to do, but in a pinch…)?

Your team is creative. They’re driven to getting work out the door. Their job is to take parts and materials and ingredients and put them together for your products and your customers. Success often looks like boxes, crates, and pallets stacked by the loading docks. How are they getting those things into the boxes? Well, in at least one case, perhaps (just perhaps) a tool became a hammer.

Paperless Operations

How would you know? And how do you know the other issues that your team is having? Perhaps you have a daily huddle or a board where you report these. Maybe you expect (or hope) that they’re telling their supervisors. Some of you may even use the good old suggestion box.

Whatever your method, if you’re not letting your production team communicate directly with you and the people that can help them solve small, large, unique, common, simple or production-ending problems, they are likely doing “whatever it takes” to move the stuff towards the dock. That’s how they finish their work. That’s how they get to go home.

Give them the tools they need to do their work. Show them that they can give you feedback and you can and will do something about it. A digital production system enables the immediate and focused flow of information that you’ll need to do this. And I’m not referring to a central PC where your team clocks in and out of jobs. That’s an ERP’s way of trying to connect you with your shop floor. I’m talking about a system that flexes with them. Gives them help when they need it and a quick way to alert you when the simple answer won’t work.

We have some quick tools we use to determine the “reverse” situations in your team and environment and can help you uncover them if you don’t know what they are. Reach out and ask us how.