Back to Basics | Afrilean Consulting

Create Enquiring Minds

The tools for developing the thinking skills of your employees will be under your nose, at your fingertips, or even hanging on your wall. You can begin to build or improve employee thinking skills and job performance with little or no cost to your business. Generally factories have a wealth of charts, pictures, graphs, processes etc. on the walls but most employees mumble when asked what these visuals are. Employees have little say on what information is displayed so no feeling of ownership and little interest. Here a team is busy creating a map to help them visually display the process they follow during a product change on their line. They used it to come up with ideas to improve a changeover process resulting in a reduced in time (56%) and reduction of start-up waste of 73%.

A number of people responded to our last newsletter asking for more information about using the brainpower of your teams to solve problems. It’s easy to talk about getting teams to think but how is it done in practice. First you must realise that you are trying to change a culture and that is going to take time. There is no quick fix. Some hints on how to simplify the process are…

Make thinking visible.
- Encourage team members to write down or draw their improvement ideas or problems. It may help to have a standard idea form and problem form.
- Use photo’s – remember a picture says a thousand words. Use arrows and captions to explain the photo.
- Use notice boards to display the ideas and problems. The more people who see the notice board the better.
- Allow everyone to write their comments on the ideas displayed this way you can brainstorm over shifts.
- Reward or recognise ideas that deliver sustainable results or financial benefits.
Challenge the team. Get them to solve specific problems starting with relatively simple ones progressing in difficulty.
Teach teams simple problem solving tools
- Make a habit of asking questions. (5 Why analysis)
- Use a Matrix – not only is it good for gathering and sorting information but it also inspires creative thinking and problem solving.
Involve the team in practically testing and communicating their ideas.

Given the chance people naturally try to improve their lives and make their work easier. All your teams need are the tools to help them improve and lots of support. The results will be amazing and sustainable.

Chicken or the Egg

No matter how good your equipment is, it can only be as good as the operator allows it to be. (picture) Our chicken and egg question today is…do you hire in skills and expertise or do you develop them in-house?

It is relatively easy to purchase and import new (and sometimes second hand) equipment knowing what optimal performance can be expected once installed. The problem arises in finding the correct knowledge and skills to operate the equipment at maximum efficiency. Recruiting operators with the specific skill sets and product knowledge required for your plant and equipment is nearly impossible. Often basic training is given and over time we see efficiencies that are below expected standards. Pressure is applied to improve production resulting in little or no planned or preventative maintenance because any downtime means lost production. Over time the production team become demotivated and the equipment deteriorates leading to more and more unplanned stoppages.

So how do we develop and foster this knowledge. Working on the premiss that “None of us is as smart as all of us” Over the years I have found that the knowledge and skills we need to be world class are generally on the shop floor. The problem is that it is scattered amongst all of the operators, technicians and management staff. The solution is find the people with these pockets of knowledge and skill sets and create an environment that will allow them to document and coach their expertise.

African story…a filling team used the ‘Back 2 Basics’ process to create a Best Operating Practice by putting all their knowledge and skills in one place. Each ‘expert’ drew up a One Point Lesson (OPL) for each bit of knowledge or skill they had. Sometimes a few would gather together to pool their resources. Once the OPL’s were developed every member of the team was trained and tested by their peers resulting in a high performance team with multi skilled members. After 3 months equipment performance had improved by 18% and unplanned stoppages reduced to zero.

Sustainability is driven by Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), which must become part of your culture. This means the establishment of small group activities to improve the efficiency of the manufacturing function by minimising inputs and maximising outputs through loss analysis. It takes some time…so persevere. The result will be that your equipment will become more reliable leading to operation and life cycle costs being reduced. Training and multi skilling should become an everyday routine and you will find that authority is replaced with leadership.