Top 10 Productivity Bugbears.

Coming from the world of manufacturing, productivity can be easily measured. The route to productive working is in theory simple, but in practice complex. During the last 15 years these are the most common issues I have encountered.

1) This is the way things have always been done.

If I had £1 for every time I heard this, I wouldn't need to work. Many manufacturing processes have changed very little over the last 100 years of so, meaning that there is merit in looking into history for inspiration. However when something plainly does not work, no amount of justification can put that right. The solution really is to look at each individual application and working at a root cause level, devise the most cost effective solution to the problem.

2) Such and such believes that this is the best way.

Personal opinions are great, when they are correct. However I have noticed on many occasions the most relevant opinions are often swept aside in favour of those who've shouted their opinions the loudest.

Those with actual hands on experience of doing the job usually have the most knowledge, but are often overlooked in favour those with greater qualifications. As a qualified engineer, I value and believe in my qualifications, however I am very aware that on their own the won't carry me through most situations.

Ive worked in engineering commercially since the age of 13 and had been gaining experience of personal and farm projects for many years before that. Where ive reviewed my early work later in life, overall I have been very impressed at what I achieved with very little knowledge, equipment of skills. All I had was the power of thought and a reasonably ordered thought process.

Qualifications and experience have sped this process up considerably as I know have sufficient knowledge to quickly rule options in or out without having to spend hours considering them on paper. Which leads me on to my next point.

3) Complacency and over confidence.

Start with nothing, successfully make something out of it and feel invincible. This is something that I have done myself on many occasions and seen many times in others. Usually the next project will swiftly brings one down to earth with a thud. Over the years Ive noticed that the more I learn about engineering, the more I learn of how much I don't know. No one person has the head-space to know everything about engineering, although Isombard Kingdom Brunel did come pretty close.

4) Rushing from the beginning, to work harder later recovering from early mistakes.

16 years ago, I remember my apprentice master saying "throw it away and start again" in his native Manx accent. However at project level this is rarely applied. In practice I hear "we've come this far with it, we need to make it work" (badly). Mistakes are valuable part of the learning process, but continuing with them once they have been identified is something I'm yet to see the merit in.

A very relevant case study is a project that I have been involved with from 2003 to present. An Australian automation company known as Modra Automation started manufacturing a machine called a VM3 in about 1996. The machine manufactured vertical blind louvers. It was a game-changer in its day and is still the most cost effective method of manufacturing louvers. However much of its engineering is only really of prototype quality and it was never expected that these machines 21 years later would still be soldiering on with many having manufactured well over 1 million louvers. As of 2008 I became the sole provider of support of these machines following modra's cessation of trading. The fundamental issue with these machines is that a 5 minute routine maintenance issue takes 4-5 hours to remedy due to the very open tolerences that the machines components were manufactured to requiring a substantial re-calibration after re-assembly.

Whilst its very easy for me to identify the machines short comings, its somewhat more difficult to remedy these as I need to earn a living which takes most of my time and most of my financial resources are tied up in my business interests. In addition I believe that the vertical blind market is in decline and therefore would not be worth investing some £20-30k into developing a new machine. However 15 years after I first got involved with these machines people are still wanting to buy them.

5) Customers.

Customers are the lifeline of any business, however they can also be a business's biggest problem. Why? A typical scenario is that a customer approaches talking of 1000's of units, they then ask for quotes for 100, 50, 10 and a one off prototype. Ok 4 quotes in one hit, perfectly manageable in theory. In practice it means obtaining 4 lots of quotes for materials/supplies which for many suppliers seems to present a challenge.

When the customer receives the quote they often notice that the unit price for 100 pieces is around half that of a single item. Many question this, but seem perplexed when I try to explain things like set up costs and buying power. If I can buy 100 units worth of material for half the unit price of one units worth, my costs of fulfilling their order will be lower. It takes the same time to mount a workholding device on a machine for 1 unit or 100. It takes as long to prepare a quote, invoice and if required recover the amount due. In short the economy of scale.

6) Penny pinching.

The company bean counter tells the engineer that we can save 10% on set up costs by doing x,y and z. Little does the bean counter realise that that will ad 25% to the production time of every subsequent part.

We need a new fixture, lets adapt the one we don't use any more. Really? Well in practice what are you actually saving? In practice the labour cost of recovering the materials, particularly if they have been welded, will often exceed the cost of new material. When the new material arrives, the toolmaker can crack on with production, rather than waste time recovering second hand materials. Also when making a clean start, a much better design can often be achieved.

"This end mill costs £60, our regular ones cost £5 and it looks like a piece of pasta" was the reaction of my then boss in 2002 when a salesman tried to sell us newfangled high speed endmills. But during a free trial we discovered that actually they halved our cycle times and instead of earning £30 per machine hour we were earning £60. In addition we improved our workflow by 1/3 without the need to hire more people or invest in more machines. We never went back to traditional endmills, we couldn't afford to.

7) Undue interference.

How often have you found yourself in a position where you know exactly what to do, but you have allowed yourself to be directed into doing something different by someone else? How often does that person then blame you for things not working out? Its actually quite common, but normally unintentional.

8) Speed and deadlines.

Many people think deadlines are good, I disagree and I have previously blogged about this subject at length. The main advantage of a deadline is that it gives closure date to the planner/financier. The problem is that most plans don't allow for real world problems like people rushing at the beginning (design) and missing important details that result in a significant undoing of the good work done in a project to remedy. People may also feel the pressure of hot deadlines and make unplanned mistakes in their work requiring further remedial time. Suppliers can sometimes be slow or other problems can arise.

One of my clients recently had a problem with their longstanding powder coater over heating some fabricated steel components and causing distortion. It had taken two months to source the materials and to have these parts fabricated ready for powder coating and in addition my client had spent a solid two weeks advancing the rest of the project only to find that these parts didn't fit. As I was visiting that day I took a look and suspected heat distortion having seen it happen before. I scraped some of the coating off with my penknife to reveal heavily blued steel. As we couldn't prove that the temper of the steel hadn't been changed we had no option but to scrap that batch of 50 parts.

9) Indecision.

As a young apprentice in a failing company I was performing pretty much all shop floor rolls. On this occasion it was a Friday and that evening I was going out on a date with a really nice girl who looks wise was way out of my league. I set a machine up for a production run which took about 1 hour. I was then told that the production priorities had been changed and I needed to break that setup down and mount a different setup. 2 hours later and ready to go, you've probably guessed it, change of plan. Another 2 hours passed and another change of plan, with the end of the day approaching I just set the machine up ready for Monday. As I was getting ready to leave, I found myself on the receiving end of a massive bollocking as to why I had achieved nothing that afternoon. I was then bollocked some more for saying what happened as it was construed as me making excuses. In essence I was being expected to work late to make up for the lost time to which I simply said ive done 12 hours, im not doing any more, see you Monday. I felt physically sick afterwards and the date that evening was the most un-enjoyable of my life. When Monday came around I was all fired up to tell the company where to stick their job, as the Fridays incident was not a one off, but instead I ran into the receivers who were liquidating the company.

10) Demand exceeding expectation.

To many of us this scenario would never be considered as it just seems to good to be true. However in 2003 after my above employer went into receivership, I found myself a new job the same day. The company had started out by importing the modra machines as mentioned above, but a number of smaller customers who didn't have the demand to justify a machine of their own persuaded the company to manufacture louvers using the demo machines.

As the unit was only ever set up for demonstration, production became very chaotic very quickly and when I joined the machines had become buried under rolls of blind fabric. Luckily the unit was large enough to accommodation the machines once set up for production and this is what I did before moving on to the servicing and maintenance side of things.

Me myself and I - Added bonus.

I am an experienced toolroom and production engineer, having spent much of the last 17 years studying manufacturing process's so that I can design and manufacture tooling and production systems that best suit my clients needs.