Share
If you are serious about exposing pinch-points immediately within your operations to find problems that plague your business operations, add buzzers through your plant. It may sound ridiculous but giving your employees the ability to draw attention to those points in your company that fail throughout the day through the use of a loud irritating buzzer has a lot of merit, even though unconventional. It gets people involved and no one wants to be the one at fault.
Attach buzzers at convenient locations. You must encourage use of these loud screeching or deep buzzing boxes attached to the walls, aisles or where-ever you deem appropriate. You want your operators to draw immediate attention to process jams or problems.
Draw up the rules and tell everyone. Define slowdowns, how long they can be tolerated and then after meeting with your employees, define very clearly when they are encouraged to hit the buzzer. Inform them that as long as they follow the rules, their participation will be encouraged and the whole concept will help streamline your firm’s processes.
Find out where the waste lies in your organization. You need to know which production delay, wrong decision, slow or uninformed supervisor or unorganized forklift driver is costing you time and money. You want your employees to bring attention to being held up by one or more processes, people, forklifts, delivery men, QC inspectors or a number of other reasons. Yes, you are creating conflict and in some cases, anger, but otherwise, your firm is wasting money, no one is speaking up and you wonder at the end of the shift why there is not more production?
Discover the pinch-points. Pinch-points are areas where work flow has stopped because someone or something is holding up people, material, processes or anything that hinders production. It happens when someone is failing to do their job. For example it could for example be a new untrained person put in a position prematurely who now is holding up a number of angry workers, all because of the failure of a lazy supervisor. The pinch-point might be the unfinished duties of the guy who is gone for the day and was not replaced by the assigned supervisor. It is one person or single groups that are untrained or work slower than the rest of their co-workers. You need to know who the laggards are.
Your problems may be lack of training. It might also be something as simple as employees who do not know the proper work flow and thus find themselves holding others back from working. Regardless of the reason, loud blaring buzzers will help to find these issues quickly so steps can be taken to solve the problem. The faster you find out the better, regardless of whether you like the buzzer or not. As soon as you see the problem, you can do something or take steps to fix it. Why wait when you can get buzzed.
Trigger the review, analysis and on-the-job learning process once a buzzer goes off. Take the time to train your workers when a backup occurs. If production flows stop beyond a pre-defined time limit (i.e. five minutes) the buzzer is pushed. The disturbance will quickly and successfully get management’s attention. At this point, what or who caused a delay? Who are the players and once questioned as to the problem, the supervisor now understands what is holding up his shift’s assigned work. Many times he may realize his training is lacking. The process opens everyone’s’ eyes and that is good for the company. Find out now versus later.
Do not gripe at the one who pushes the buzzer. This person is telling the supervisor he wants to work but someone is holding him up. You want this immediate feedback from your employees so do not be angry with this person; he is helping your operation. Look elsewhere and immediately start asking questions what failed. There should be no ramification to the buzzer pusher or he will not use the buzzer thus defeating your purpose.
Tie the buzzers to incentives if appropriate. If given the chance, even if installed for only a few weeks, this approach will work very well and more importantly very quickly. It worked in the automotive plant (rocker arm manufacturer) in Toledo, Ohio where this writer worked in the 1980s. One man one machine setup operators were paid hefty incentives for piece work in this automotive stamping shop. The employees had their own individual buzzer at their machine to give notice to material handlers to bring more products. When the employee was out of material, his or her hourly rate dropped down to a fairly low minimum rate. Those buzzers went off when these employees wanted to make more money. In this case, 80% of the employed were women who ran the stamping presses and these ladies did not hesitate to let everyone know they were out of stock and wanted more now!
If buzzers are disliked, install flashing lights which get everyone’s attention. An alternative to buzzers are flashing lights which work almost as well and more quietly. You can choose buzzers or lights. K-Mart used its blue flashing light cart to get customers to pay attention to product specials featured for ten minutes within its stores for many years.
Buzzers or lights, provide immediate training. One of these ideas draws immediate attention to your production problems. They can be fixed ‘live’ so employees learn what methods work and which do not. Whichever option you choose, use them and learn from them. Both buzzers and lights do an excellent job of isolating who is at fault, what department is deficient on resources and who needs training. Try it for a limited time and your training time drop. You will also learn where your problems are in the facility. You will see a quick turnaround in process flow if you currently do not know who is at fault. You will know quickly by the end of the first couple of days because you no longer must wait to discover the problems.
Investors do not want to risk their funds. Employees prefer to do their job rather than hear a loud buzzer or see a flashing light every 15 minutes. You may read this and think it is doubtful a company would go to this extent to learn its operating problems but you are wrong. Most companies who risk their investors’ money on new projects and products do not like risk and want their firms up and running as quickly as possible.
Investors want to know where the problems are immediately. They want to start making money and demand to know what is holding them up from doing so. They do not appreciate problems that pop up along the path to making profits. Investors who have invested millions of dollars are willing to do nearly anything in order to see production get up to forecasted and profitable levels. This is where you can help.
Isolate the problems in the production process as quickly as possible. In order to do this, you as a manager or supervisor must pinpoint the problems and situations which stop the process as quickly as possible. When you speed up the learning process and draw attention on those who are holding up the line, problems get defined and resolved. Incentives tied into performance also help to speed things up.
Questions for all plant or company personnel about pinch-points and log-jams:
- What are the pinch-points in the plant that you have seen and witnessed that significantly jam things up?
- Where are these pinch-points located and at what times of the day or evening do these areas interrupt the normal smooth flow of operations?
- Describe the top three backlogs or jam-ups that occur during a typical day? What do you suggest to resolve these problems?
- Who needs to take production backlogs more seriously than they currently do? Please mention the person or function who or which can reduce the frequency of these shutdowns during the shift.
