Drive Manufacturing Incidents to Zero: Leverage the Power of Your Team to Take Effective, Corrective, and Preventive Actions

Transcription

1 Drive Manufacturing Incidents to Zero: Leverage the Power of Your Team to Take Effective, Corrective, and Preventive Actions Twin Lakes Consulting Corporation Doug Hagy

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3 Page 1 of 13 Drive Manufacturing Incidents to Zero: Leverage the Power of Your Team to Take Effective, Corrective, and Preventive Actions Abstract Your business can establish and operate an information gathering, decision making, action taking framework to drive adverse manufacturing incidents to near-zero. Three contexts are considered: safety incidents, quality (non-conformance) incidents, and tangible asset failure incidents. A common framework is used to address each of these incident contexts. The differences are primarily semantic. A cross-functional Incident Reduction team is cast as the cornerstone of this initiative. Tools for recording incidents are discussed. An approach to transform raw data into action-oriented analytics is presented. A means for objectively demonstrating team success is demonstrated. Connections to employee training, quality management, and knowledge management are identified. The proposed framework can be deployed quickly. It leverages capabilities of your people to create a sustainable, custom-fitted, business optimizing, resource for your business.

4 Page 2 of 13 Project Charter What We re Doing The mission is to eradicate adverse manufacturing incidents and the factors identified as incident root causes. Why We re Doing It Adverse manufacturing incidents indicate shortcomings in process, practice, supplier, or environmental factors. Steps taken to mitigate manufacturing incident risk will make a business safer, more efficient, and more profitable. How We re Going to Get It Done A cross-functional team will be formed. Its mission is to identify undesired manufacturing incidents and drive their occurrence frequency to as near-zero as practical. A procedure for recording incidents, as they occur, will be implemented. The team will convene to periodically assess incident frequency and business impact. The team will prioritize, formulate, and execute corrective and preventive actions. Team impact on incident frequency will be tracked and showcased.

5 Page 3 of 13 Data Metrics Analytics Action Impact Team Accomplishment Procedures

6 Page 4 of 13 1 Form a cross-functional Incident Reduction team. When your organization is large, you may decide to create teams around different types of incidents (e.g. safety, quality, tangible asset). Smaller organizations may create a single team to support incident reduction for the long haul. Who belongs on this team? Look for people who (1) know your business and (2) encounter incidents in varied ways. Include teammates who Buy things. (Purchasing, Sr. Buyer, Stakeholder, Finance) Manage physical assets. (Inventory, Operations, Commodities Manager) Make things. (Shop Floor, Operations, Office) Service your equipment and support your customers. (Maintenance, MRO - Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul, and Customer Service) Dispose of depleted materials and assets. (MRO, Stakeholder, Finance) Adopt the term cross-functional team to inspire the variety of representation and thinking you expect among team members. 2 Build a mechanism for recording incidents as they occur. a. Convene a meeting of the Incident Reduction team. b. Create a starting list of incidents to track. Start with what team members have seen to date. Safety incidents, often appearing as lost-time accidents or injuries, may be recorded against specific affected employees or facility locations. Examples: dangerous occurrences, occupational diseases, and construction incidents Quality incidents, often characterized as nonconformances, may be recorded against manufacturing work orders or related component suppliers. Examples: failure to meet mechanical or physical properties, color mismatches, bad component alignment and visual registration flaws Tangible asset failure incidents may be recorded against specific failing assets or asset suppliers. Examples: equipment breakdowns, operator error resulting in disabled machinery, and tool failure The list(s) will be expanded and revised as actual incidents are encountered. c. Build a mechanism, and a supporting procedure, to record incident occurrences. Choose a technology platform that best supports your effort. You might adopt an Excel worksheet, load an Access database, or subscribe to a dedicated cloud app. Ensure that recording incidents is a streamlined activity. Don t impede getting work done while capturing these events. A dedicated cloud app can equip users to efficiently record incidents, using their mobile device, as incidents are observed. Accomplishment Incidents are being recorded. New incident types are added as they are encountered. The framework is recording data.

7 Page 5 of 13 3 Create a bar chart to present recorded data. a. Specify a time frame. Perhaps a calendar quarter 01/01/ /31/2018 b. Extract data from your recording platform. c. Present incident occurrences in descending frequency order. d. Your chart can look like this. e. Present the chart to your team. Accomplishment Metrics are presented visually to describe incident occurrences over time.

8 Page 6 of 13 4 Use FMEA-inspired thinking to reflect what your team believes is most important. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a good-fit tool for this project. Incidents indicate failures in process, practice, or materials. Gain insight with FMEA. Incidents occurring most frequently are not necessarily of the greatest consequence to your business. Assess failure likelihood and the impact of observed incidents. This will help the team to be smarter about choosing the incidents that get attention. Challenge your team to assign weights that place incident occurrences in best juxtaposition. To apply FMEA to recorded incident data, three factors are utilized. Severity Probability of Occurrence Risk of Non-detection These factors draw heavily on team judgement to determine. They are used to calculate a 'risk priority number' (RPN) for each observed incident. Incidents are then prioritized for investigation based on their RPNs. Severity relates to incident impact on the organization. A disabled vital asset can shut down a factory or cause deliveries to come to a halt. Some kinds of failure may have an asset disabled for an extended time. Other failures might entail a quick fix. The weight assigned to severity could also reflect cost of preventive maintenance; the idea being that you might purposefully forego maintenance when a failure is regarded as inconsequential when compared to the cost of maintenance. Using a scale of 1-10, a failure with an easy fix, with a low downtime duration, and small consequential cost could be assigned a 1. A failure that's complicated to service, with a long downtime duration, and high consequential cost, could be assigned 7 or 8. Probability of Occurrence, for the example that follows, is the relative failure frequency among all the recorded failures. Other probabilities may be explored. Your team might use an absolute frequency, say, number of expected failures per 100 uses, rather than a relative frequency. The purpose is to apply a factor that more heavily weighs failures that occur more frequently. Risk of Non-Detection can be given a scale of Failures that are likely to be detected can have a low factor, say 1. Failures that may go undetected (until they have significantly impacted the organization) can have a high factor, like 7 or 8. Reserve factor weights of 9 or 10 for failures that relate to catastrophe like loss of life, injury, or severe damage to the business. RPN is calculated as Severity x Probability of Occurrence x Risk of Non-Detection.

9 Page 7 of 13 Instruct the team to refer to the incident frequency bar chart. Gain insight and inspiration for probability of occurrence and risk of non-detection from this chart. Determining factor values can challenge the team. As a cross-functional group, varying business perspectives will impact opinions about factor magnitude. Factor scale can be a point of contention. If the "Probability" factors were all divided by 10, they would still reflect relative probability of occurrence among the different failures. Their overall impact on RPN values would be less substantial. Team wisdom is required to assign reasonable factors, and factor scaling, to arrive at RPNs the team can rely on to impact the investigation priority assigned to each failure. Calculate RPN for each reported incident. Generate a weighted chart. The chart can look like this. When the incidents are sorted by RPN, the team will see that the incident priority sequence differs from when incidents are sorted by frequency. Accomplishment The metrics have been transformed into custom analytics raw metrics are re-cast to reflect what s most important to your team. These analytics answer a question - Which incidents are most important investigate? The team may have little influence over incident severity. Focus attention on reducing incident occurrence probability and improving the ability to detect incidents.

10 Page 8 of 13 5 Determine Incident Root Causes Problems get solved when their root causes are identified and treated. The web is replete with articles about ways to get to the root cause of any problem. This ebooklet introduces two techniques that work well with problem solving teams; Cause and Effect Diagrams and 5 Whys. Cause and Effect Diagrams Using a whiteboard and a marker, start a lively discussion to uncover failure root causes. Start the conversation with a statement of the "effect" - the incident you wish to avoid. Propose cause categories like "Materials", "People", "Equipment", and "Process". For each of these cause categories, your team develops a list of potential causes for the undesired effect. Each of the potential causes is investigated to assess its probable contribution to the effect. 5 Whys Asking "Why?" can help you and your team drill down to uncover problem root causes. Why did the truck get the flat tire? Because it drove over a nail in our vehicle service shop. Why was there a nail on the floor in the vehicle service shop? Because a box of loose nails was spilled from a work table. Why was a box of loose nails sitting on a work table where it could be spilled? Because a workshop table repair required nails. A box of nails was brought in from the wood shop to support the repair. The team implements a "corrective" action. (e.g. Procedure is updated to require thorough sweeping of the work area after repairs are performed. This will pick up stray tools and fasteners that are brought in to support repairs.) A team will typically get to the root cause of most problems by asking "Why?" approximately five times.

11 Page 9 of 13 6 Take "Corrective" and "Preventive" Action Action must be taken to remedy the failure root cause(s) found by the team. The goal is to eliminate, or at least reduce the frequency of, the observed incidents. What's the difference between a "corrective" and a "preventive" action? A corrective action is taken as a response to an event that has already occurred. The goal is to reduce or eliminate the likelihood that the event will recur. A preventive action is taken in anticipation of an event that might occur. The goal is the reduce or eliminate the likelihood that the event will ever occur. Most actions your team will take will be corrective because they will be in response to observed occurrences. Discussion may occasionally reveal an opportunity to make a change to prevent an incident that has not yet occurred. Such actions would be regarded as preventive. What kinds of action might your team pursue? When an adverse incident is connected to human error, enhancements can be made to training to reduce the occurrence of the error. When a fault is found with the tangible asset, the issue could be traced to missed or improperly performed preventive maintenance. The team might also discover quality differences among asset suppliers and may influence purchasing decisions to favor suppliers whose assets fail less often. Industrial safety incidents seem to have a near-universal set of contributing factors. The Resources section, at the end of this ebooklet, includes a link from OSHA to learn more about safety incidents and their root causes. Accomplishment The team is taking corrective and preventive action against the root causes of observed incidents.

12 Page 10 of 13 6 Chart Team Progress Line charts provide objective evidence to show the impact of your team's efforts on reducing incident rates over time. The visual slope is a vivid depiction of team progress in eradicating adverse manufacturing incidents. This is one case where a chart s downward slope indicates positive progress. Vertical bar chats use a familiar format to depict adverse incident occurrences.

13 Page 11 of 13 A thought-provoking chart, like this radar chart, creates a unique perspective on team progress, stimulates lively conversation, and piques leadership interest in the team s work. Accomplishment Team impact on incident frequency is tracked and showcased.

14 Page 12 of 13 Connections to Employee Training Employee training programs are designed to produce desired behaviors. In manufacturing settings, desired behaviors can affect properties imparted to products as they are manufactured. Examples of product properties affected by employee behavior include applied paint quality, label placement, bolt tightening, lubricant application and the like. Kirkpatrick Level III training evaluation is intended to verify that desired behaviors are being practiced. In a manufacturing context, this type of evaluation need not be performed as a separate step. Product inspection is already checking paint quality, label placement, etc. When non-conformances are detected during inspection, it can be inferred that trained qualityrelated behaviors are not being practiced. The resulting quality incidents can serve as indicators that there are deficiencies in related training. Affected employees may receive followup training. Training programs may be enhanced to provide better training for new trainees. Conversely, inspection can provide objective evidence that desired, trained, behaviors are being practiced. In the absence of inspection quality incidents, it can reasonably be inferred that desired behaviors are practiced. Connections to Quality Management Team efforts should be guided by procedures for performing each step of the process. Procedures ought to be managed with a formal process for creating, deploying, and maintaining procedures. Such procedures, in a QMS context, are referred to as documents. Safety, quality, and tangible asset incidents should be recorded as failures, incidents, or nonconformances. They ought to be handled in much the same way as quality management systems manage non-conforming products. Non-conforming products, services, and situations must not be allowed to find their way to the customer. Evidence that procedures are being followed meetings are being convened, incidents are identified, corrective and preventive actions are taken should be recorded as evidence procedures are being followed. In a QMS context, such recordings are referred to as records. Connections to Knowledge Management Procedures serve as a knowledge repository. In the absence of formally maintained procedures, the know-how resides in people s heads as tribal knowledge. Such knowledge can walk out the door when employees leave the business. When know-how is recorded as procedures, knowledge is retained and shared as new hires enter the business. Procedures codify, and nurture consistency in ways work is done. Guiding the Incident Reduction team with procedures gives the team, and the business, the advantages of knowledge retention. Related procedures ensure approach consistency as team composition changes.

15 Page 13 of 13 Concluding Points This project leverages the power of a cross-functional team to make sustainable, beneficial, change. The team prioritizes, formulates, and executes corrective and preventive actions. A cross-functional team is beneficial to the incident analysis process. Identification of root causes and formulating corrective actions draws upon varied disciplines and perspectives within the organization - purchasing, human resources, quality assurance, operations, etc. Team conversations create a path from raw data to metrics to analytics to action to impact. Incident reduction is an ongoing process. Build incident recording into daily work practices. Streamline your techniques and periodically convene the Incident Reduction team to create charts, calculate RPNs, identify root causes, take corrective and preventive actions, and chart progress. Desktop tools, like Excel and Access, can be used to record incidents and produce visual renderings to support team thinking. Cloud-based tools, designed to support and streamline this type of initiative, are available from Twin Lakes Consulting. Fall 2018 Twin Lakes Consulting Corporation Related Resources Doug Hagy has extensive experience developing technology solutions for industry... O Shop floor solutions for a wide variety of manufacturing situations. O Vehicle and production tracking for the construction supply industry. O Order management, job costing, billing and general accounting. O Tangible business asset management. O Training tracking and evaluation. O Disability prediction and tracking. O Pari-mutuel betting for horse racing. Westinghouse Engineering Achievement Award. ICCP CDP credential. Earned recognized credentials for quality management and training and development. Developed a structured program that helps SMB / B2B manufacturers rejuvenate their top line revenue streams. Principal developer behind Twin Lakes Consulting s growing line of TLboost cloud-based niche apps for business. doughagy@