Process Improvement - Nearly

I'm a Contract Mechanical Engineer and often get asked to look at process improvement problems.
A few weeks ago a colleague asked me to help one of his customers.  A small family business manufacturing printed and plain wrapping paper.   They where struggling.
Originally they were distributers of paper products and had quite a good distribution business.  One of their suppliers had gone bankrupt and they had bought one of his flexo printers, some rewinders and ancillary equipment at auction – very cheap.

As well as their existing paper products delivery business, they were now printers and converters.
As far as I could tell, they had no previous manufacturing experience.
It was a family business and the manufacturing side was being managed – hands on – by the son of the owner who was a young guy in his early 20's, plus a couple of helpers.

A typical day went like this -
Arrive 7.30 am
Survey the mess from yesterday.  Review the schedule for today.  Start cleaning up from yesterday.  
As anyone with flexo printing knowledge will know, the inks cure and go hard fairly quickly.  When left over a warm night they are difficult to clean or remove.  The ink tray had been drained but everything else just left.  It was hard work to clean up and get the machine ready for the next job with lots of chipping and scraping of cured ink
Stereos where laying all over the place, wherever someone had put them down, thats where they stayed until needed again
When the stereoes (print impressions) for the next job were eventually located, they where still caked in old ink and usually needing repair
The ink trays where similarly caked in old flaking ink.
The floor under and around the machine was covered in old ink spills and paper or board which had been laid down to cover the spills and had been steadily building into a horrible mess , layer on jumbled layer.  Tools haphazardly left anywhere.
It was a disaster.  By early afternoon the machine was starting to run.  The rest of the process was equally chaotic as the samples were missing or non existent and there was no real quality check, just produce some product, anything,  near enough is good enough
Eventually the machine started to produce finished product.
The majority of the day had been eaten up, leaving a very short time to produce.  Running through into overtime, enough of the  job was eventually completed to partially fill the order.
The ink was drained ( although I was told that sometimes the tray was covered over with plastic film if they where running really late) and the exhausted and stressed crew left everything “as is” and went home.

The next day, the whole process was repeated.

Having observed and  spoken to a range of people including operators, customers and suppliers It seemed that this business had the potential to be really successful.  If it could get the manufacturing process organised.  I could see why my colleague was keen to help them as he was a supplier of stereo materials.  

I formulated a plan of action.

A – Get the production plant in order - Start with a modified 5S approach
Schedule a planned outage for a 1 day a fortnight until on top of the problems
1.    Strip all removable parts
2.    Thoroughly clean the machine and floor area
3.    There where too many stereos to attack at once, so use a Pareto approach start a program to
1.    immediately work on fixing 20% which are used regularly
2.    progressively work on the remainder with milestones for completion
4.    Build purpose designed racks for the stereos with clear identification so that they can be stored alphabetically or given numbers or a similar system.  
5.    Sort all loose parts and build storage
6.    Sort all tools required to run the machine and build shadow boards
7.    Set up a kanban system for inks and consumables
8.    Keep a daily log of problems and issues.  What worked well – what didn't work well

B - Get some common sense, basic production management into the process.
As one of my old managers was very fond of saying when confronted with the statement – “Surely thats just common sense” - - “The problem with common sense is that it is not very common”

In a bigger organisation, a morning production review meeting would be essential, but with a small hands on operation like this, probably not required, tho'  I believe it's essential to have a weekly review and forward planning meeting at say 9.00am Friday morning, to review the log for last weeks production run and plan the program for the next week including a check that all materials, consumables processes and ancillary items are accounted for.  Plus build some slack into the system to cover any problems.  Have a clearly defined schedule of what will be produced next week

Create SOP's for the work and check lists

Build in “clean up” time – work out what time is needed to clean down the machine, remove and clean the stereos and other ancillaries.  So that the crew can walk in the next day and start to run.  Say, 30 min set up time with production to start at 8.00 am.  Be realistic with the time estimate.  There is no value in fudging figures at this stage.  Times can be refined further down the track when everyone is in a good routine
The clean up time needs to be subtracted from the scheduled finish time
e.g if 30 minutes is required - Stop the line at 4.00pm.  Clean down and put everything away for a 4.30 shift finish
What ever needs to be done in order to start the line “cleanly” the next morning.
Keep a log of settings – for future reference.  Keep a log of repairs required and ensure plans to complete the repairs ASAP.  If overtime is required, the 30 minute clean down is still allowed for
e.g. a 6.30pm shift finish means that the machine stops at 6.00pm

It's not rocket science – it's pretty basic but needs to be done so as to get on top of the problems and start to work more efficiently and reduce stress and of course work more safely.

I put together a proposal along these lines and had a meeting with the son and the owner.

The son was completely against my proposal and the father sided with his son.  The son became very aggressive and it was quite obvious that he was not in the slightest bit interested in even considering a change to his existing routine.  If fact he could not see a problem with the way the plant was currently operating.

Sometimes it's just not worth the effort.  It soon became clear that my proposal was going nowhere.  I backed off and backed out.
 
I rang my colleague and related the story to him.  His mmmmm's, ahhhhh's and sighs led me to believe that he knew what the outcome would be, before I ever set a foot inside the door.

It was a pity, because it had the potential to be a really good little business.

Sometimes you just need to know when to walk away.  
I felt rather sorry for the father who I felt did understand.  But the son fell into the “Spoilt Brat” category and was going to do it his way.  
It might have worked for Sinatra, but I doubt it will work for them.

Anyway, life's too short to get stressed over what I can't change

I'll mark this one down to Process Improvement - Nearly