Implementation

 

Introduction

Ideas can fizzle out just as fast as they can be thought up if no one implements or takes action.  Moving forward with an idea can be the most difficult part of taking an idea and seeing it through.  When implementing ideas I believe it is crucial that you have as many people on board with the idea as possible to help mitigate the many questions and possible negative feedback.  This is why having management behind the idea is important, having this “backbone” to help keep the momentum moving forward despite reluctancy.

The idea behind this is to help make communication of any deviation more visible.  Managers often take the lions share and fails to delegate in areas where floor level employees can offer help.  During any processes of the day technicians have multiple opportunities to make a mistake or unknowingly or even knowingly deviate from a standard process.  Allowing a visual chart that offers clarity to these deviations help give the technicians an opportunity to get a jump start on changing the approach quickly.

Schedules:

Implementing this project will only have a time constraints when walking to the board and writing the findings, when a manager receives and email from QA or from the EM group he/she can then communicate this by marking a finding on the appropriate technicians name and area of deviation.  This board is placed in an area that is easily seen for the group and offers a lot of information quickly.   If an investigation is necessary the technician who is responsible will know and be prepared instead of blindsided months after it happened.

The beauty of this implementation is that technicians will see that mistakes or deviations are happening.  It is my opinion that when a person sees that a mistake happens, typically others will self reflect and check themselves on their own practices.  None of the information on the board will give specifics as to what the deviation was, so these numbers simply state that a finding happened.  This helps the members of the team reevaluate daily on how they want to approach the day.  By seeing first hand that the team is doing well or if some are having problems.

Conflicts:

Some may suggests that having this type of information out for all to see may hinder the group because of the possible embarrassment or possibly gives a “singled out” approach.  In a manufacturing setting, there will always be some level of mistakes, recognizing that there should be zero findings, the bottom line is that humans are not robots and mistakes will happen daily.  The major issue that this project addresses is the opportunity to know when those mistakes happen sooner.  Many times we are unaware of when a deviation happened and often don’t find out about them until a weeks or even months later.  All the while unknowingly making those very same mistakes over and over simply because we did not know we were making them.

As a team we all work together closely every day, by having a board that offers just a glimpse of how we are doing, I believe will benefit the group.  The true details of the findings can range from a simple fingertip finding on a settle plate, or as major as an incorrect solution poured into a product.  This chart will offer no details other than the area of the finding and when the report is due.

A great example would be that I have had multiple fingertip findings on my environmental monitoring plates.  I had no idea until I received an email from my manager that stated I needed to do a re-qualification gowning and that a QAR (quality assurance report) was now in place.  It is my strong opinion that had I known that I had a even one finger tip finding I would have self checked and realized that clearly I was doing something wrong and adjusted preventing a second finding.

Progress:

Having visual charts make progress much more visible.  Each of us can see in my proposed chart how many finding we had in a given week or month and can see if those have improved.  Communication is by far the downside to this group.  The team leader fails to communicate when there is a problem until the issue has escalated to a major finding.  Many times as a team we were all unaware of a problem until it was too late.

My intentions would be to have the team leader either  walk to the board daily and update at the end of the day or to delegate someone to complete this task.  Our schedules unfortunately do not allow us to all be together at the same time unless is scheduled.  Having the simple task of marking the stats of the day or week gives a fast and easy way to communicate.

What makes this chart great is that now we can all see how we are doing, how many outstanding reports are out, areas we need to improve, and an idea of what is to be expected.  This chart will offer us the opportunity to gain insight before we are standing in front of QA investigators and team leaders trying to explain something that happened a month earlier.

SWOT Analysis

                      

Conclusion

The proposed chart has a lot of benefits to offer the assembly team,  one of the areas that this group needs improvement in is better communication and the ability to offer more critical thinking.  By having a chart that displays the areas of improvement gives this group a better understanding of where they need to improve as well as gives them the opportunity to keep each other accountable. Areas of concern for this project may be that by displaying areas of improvement may “open a can of worms” for outside stakeholders.  This may give other management a sense of need to investigate further.

I feel the benefits outweigh the negative potentials in that this will clearly demonstrate that as a group mistakes can and will happen, by communicating and displaying the areas shows  a concern and initiative for improvement. This allows the group the ability to think critically and find areas to improve.   As a group this shows initiative and concern for growth, it also shows others that they take their responsibilities serious and are always striving for better.