What can a manufacturing person learn from Walt Disney World to help with his manufacturing business? PMPA members learned the following from the Management Update Conference recently held at Disney World in Orlando.
Your shop has good quality; you have a quality management system. Your shop has good reliability; you have management systems for assuring worker safety, scheduling equipment availability and careful stewardship of financial resources.
One of the paradoxes of team sports that I struggle with has been watching a team with high-caliber players lose to a team with less talented players. We have all seen this happen time and time again.
The safety of our employees, precision and quality workmanship have always been guiding principles in the precision machining industry. What are the areas that we need to focus on for continuous improvement? Here is a baker’s dozen table of what the OSHA inspectors cited in our industry (SIC 3451; NAICS 332721 Precision Turned Products Manufacturing) for the last fiscal year (October 2005-September 2006). This data was current as of October 13, 2006.
Every day, we face numerous challenges. Urgent demands from others, unexpected events, system breakdowns, equipment malfunctions, and failed communications are "all in a day’s work," for most of us. Occasionally, a singular event arrives that has the potential to alter the circumstances of our life or work. Such an event is called a sentinel event.
Copper is selling for $3.70 per pound at the time that I am writing this in mid-September. Thefts of copper materials from homes, businesses and utilities are lead stories and front-page news on television and in the newspapers—even in the Wall Street Journal.
Numbers carry far more information than their value or size. Numbers can be thought of as having three dimensions or aspects: 1) the numeric value (arguably, the least important to the shop owner); 2) the delta (change) it represents in the quantity being measured; and 3) the vector or direction of the difference of that change from the preceding value or target (benchmark).
Go to any business and ask, "Who is responsible for generating profits?" You’ll typically get a limited number of answers. "Of course, it’s the boss" is the typical response. "The chief accountant or controller" is another common reply. While both "the boss" and the chief accountant are accountable for the company’s profit or loss, you may find that, in most companies, the profitability engineer is not the boss.
As an avid gardener, I always notice the plantings and landscaping when I make visits to manufacturing shops. The foundation plantings, shrubs and the neat appearance of the landscaping are meant to convey a positive image about the plant, the premises, the company and its people. However, I seldom take photos of the landscaping on my visits. What I really long for is a photo of a nice trash dumpster.
Having worked with and supplied a number of Japanese transplant manufacturing companies, I was always impressed with the depth of their systems and planning that made just-in-time work for them. Many of us in manufacturing are providing products to our customers on a just-in-time basis, but I wonder if we truly have a solid foundation under our so-called just-in-time systems?
These suggestions for manufacturing process improvements are based on Kaizen ideas that call for never-ending improvement from the entire organization.
Two incidents early in my career started me on the path to learning all that I could about how tools fail. The first, at a Tier One subsidiary plant of a major domestic automaker near Rochester, was a call for immediate assistance because the cold-drawn bars that my company had supplied were causing their form tools to burn up.