Being a part of modular manufacturing for over a decade now and having my hands in operations has taught me some hard lessons.  One of which is the importance of giving the people on the production floor the ability to do their jobs without wasting time gathering data. My first mistake in operations was to needlessly track every action on the production floor by having operators record every step in their work.

Imagine having to nail boards to make a wall and then having a question for every board you complete. You can see how cumbersome this process can become and I became so overly detailed with this process that it caused additional problems.  For one, I was looked at as an overbearing Broom-Hilda for expecting operators to constantly log every single action and I received push-back for slowing down the production process. Soon the urgency to complete their production activities with the constraints of also having to fill out forms resulted in garbage data getting collected. Operators rushed to check every box on forms as quickly as possible without paying close attention to what was being asked or recorded.

Due to this over-collection, our company ultimately had so much production data that we couldn’t rely on most of it in making informed decisions.  I could not say with certainty that when someone on the floor checked a quality or assembly step (e.g. confirming “ item A was fastened with the right fastener B”), that this truly was the case.  Ultimately, this caused me to have to run down quality issues that came from the field rather than dealing with issues at the factory level and preventing unnecessary service costs and repairs.