Key Points Don’t Always Hurt You…BUT They Do Hurt!

We bought this cool compact treadmill but found that it was marking up the wood floor, so I purchased a mat. The mat arrived a few days later in a taped cardboard box which was taped like a mummy. Anyway, out came the utility knife! I bent over the box without kneeling, reach as far forward as I could and plunged the blade into the gap between the flap and box. As I pulled the blade towards myself, I swiftly cut the taped seam. As the blade came closer, I just nicked my pant leg – a near miss!

I was lucky, but many people in factories are not as lucky as I was. At the recent TWI Summit, Don Dinero and I were talking about key points and how they don’t always burn you, but when they do…they hurt! When I had my near miss...something Don said quickly came to mind: key points don't alway hurt you, but eventually they will! If you have been in any of Don's JI sessions, you know his coffee maker story about key points. If you love coffee like I do, you will find his story about not knowing key points absolutely tragic ;)

Back to my knife problem. How many times have you done something a certain way, only to have it go wrong and you are left scratching your head – “what just happened here? Every other time I’ve done it this way, it worked just fine!” We end up writing it off as a fluke, failing to miss the critical passage of a missed key point.

Surprisingly, I see people cutting towards their bodies or digits often, making the same unconscious mistake that I made. And that is the problem, isn’t it? We do our jobs unconsciously, not really thinking about what we are doing because we think we know the job so well. The reality is, we are often just plain lucky.

I thought about my near miss and wrote a break down sheet so I could work my way through the potential problems I encountered. One of the problems was that if I had kneeled, I probably would have taken my time, in control and not rushed – rather than try to make one cut. If I was kneeling next to the box, I certainly wouldn’t have cut towards my legs.

Often people will purchase cut-proof gloves, safety knifes and fish knives and rely on the PPE to protect employees. Amazingly, I’ve seen people remove the guarding or mechanisms on safety knives, only so they become a more general purpose tool. The reality is this, unless people know the key points of the job, they will never know standard. If they don’t know the standard you are just plain lucky something hasn’t gone wrong today. The following link will bring you to my example JBS:

Job Instruction Breakdown Sheet Example

Training Within 'Industry Week' Article Spotlight

TWI in the spotlight! See current issue of Industry Week...

Industry Week Article Hyperlink

Wastes in Manufacturing - 93 Years Ago

Still plowing through Installing Efficiency Methods, by C.E. Knoeppel. Wish he was around today, he is probably rolling in his grave silently cursing all of us for not taking his words of wisdom to heart. 93 years ago, he wrote this book mostly based on his experience in foundries, hardly a high volume, low variety kind of manufacturing that we all wish we had. Who am I kidding, a lot of us do have that! Yet he identified these 15 wastes in manufacturing. Perhaps in this list, you will recognize a few as our eight wastes identified in Lean Manufacturing and made popular by Taiichi Ohno of TPS fame:

Knoeppel's 15 Wastes - from 1915:

1. Delays - "...mean a loss of money. As most of them can be eliminated, study of their causes is worth while."
2. Rejections - "Rejected work is a waste of the worst kind..."
3. Manufacturing Changes - "machines broken up because of rush order, incomplete designing..."
4. Idle equipment - "the burden...must be absorbed by those that are working...means a loss in production."
   
5. Inefficiency of Management - "...beyond the control of workmen is something that should be closely watched, for so long as it is in evidence maximum results are out of the question."
6. Inefficiency of Workmen - ditto.
7. Changes in operation - "When changes are necesseary in the tasks set before the men, the real reasons should be invesetigated in order to reduce them if possible to a minimum."
8. Purchase failures - "waiting for material purchased is one of the most annoying things to contend with and is a much larger factor in manufacturing than many have any idea of. It means delayed shipments, rush and hustle, loss of business, night and Sunday work, interference with plans made and numerous extra machine changes."
9. Delayed shipments - "The reputation for prompt delivery is the desire of every concern. The aim is therefore to wathc this in an effort to improve the shipping so as to enable the concern to retain the good will of the trade."
10. Faulty Movement of Material - "Managers fail to realize how easy it is to waste money in moving material."
11. Poor arrangement of equipment - "The efficiency of each unit may be high, but when inter-relation is considered, loss due to faulty arrangement is apparent."
12. Complaints - "While many men are unreasonable, the majority do not kick without having something to kick about. Where there is smoke there is fire, and analysis aims to find the fire."
13. Lack of Co-operation - "Success in increasing efficiency is largely dependent upon securing the full co-operation of men and shop management. If there is an absence of this essential, the engineer should know it, and why."
14. Faulty planning - "Anything which interferes with the most efficient planning will cause loss, confusion, and delays. As these are the very things which the engineer must eliminate if his work is to be successful, he will have to find the faults preparatory to elimination."
15. Congestion at machines - "This often holds a shop back and blocks progress. Whether the trouble is lack of equipment or the fault of the shop is something the engineer can only ascertain through analysis."
    

Any parallels here to the eight wastes? Please, leave your comments!