In this place, the place that was claimed
to be overloaded by the "bogus" report of the evil Lorraine, we take
various types of chemicals, mix them together, and in this case, pump them into
55, 30 or 15 gallon drums while other parts of the company sell these products
to the markets that develop photographs, X-rays, plates and various other
"images".
A new customer that had come on board was
a string of operations where you drop off your
photographs and they develop them for
you. This particular customer wants to receive 30 gallon drums of the eight or
nine products they need, and mix them into the using strength solution
themselves.
Turns out the demand is forecasted (there’s
that word again) for about 30,000 of these drums,
starting about June, through year-end.
The line we currently have to do this type of work currently
runs 24 hours a day, six days a week and
the supply capacity operates on that same schedule.
Plans had been underway to add another
line as some level of increase had been predicted. This new line will be
available in June, run about the same speed and therefore double our capacity.
We had, meaning the Engineering
Department, not looked into supply capacity, thinking extra filling (double)
would be ok, in hindsight that doesn't seem right, but that's what happened.
The debate was around the cost associated
with extra piping from one building to another (about $500K) which put the
entire project in danger of being dropped because the cost / benefits were not
acceptable.
It was determined that sufficient
capacity would be available to support 15 and 30 gallon production and Joe
Mancuso's 10 line project continued on.
In the mean time, here are a few things
we did:
1. To improve or current efficiencies we
began reporting daily misses, and attempted to categorize them by cause. The
thinking here was that the same things happen, over and over again, so write
them down, assign someone to fix the
problem, and it's gone. Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? No such luck.
Instead, the manager of this effort only saw fit to collect data and nothing
ever got fixed,
and guess what, everybody got real tired
of documenting daily misses. We eventually stopped
collecting daily information on misses
and as a result most of those same problems still live on.
2. We met every Wednesday instead of
monthly to talk about what areas needed what level of labor to meet the
demands. It was the intent of this meeting to move labor from one area to
another as needed, but that really never happened too much. Mostly planning
could never hold a firm plan, so all the numbers constantly changed. There was
no rhyme or reason to it and even the planning folks
saw the silliness of their
"recommendations”. Well, at least some of them did.
3. On a weekly basis we asked for some,
any idea of what export sales were for the month as a large piece of our
business is overseas. Nothing has ever happened on this, and as a matter of
fact we still
get surprised by "Mexican Social
Security" (honest to God, that kills me) on a regular basis.
4. The Product Managers now present,
monthly, an estimate of implementation plans for new products and this has
helped eliminate some surprises. This problem, however, has not been completely
eliminated, case in point K-14, Venus and ICM's, all products with dubious, at
best, introductions into manufacturing.
We still have no idea, by line, what the
proper labor hour factor to be used for planning is, which would be a great
help in planning labor. Some manual data collections happened on this (I did
it) but again, no follow up, or help from anyone else.
It has always seemed to me that
Manufacturing was not the problem, but rather, the support groups are NOT in
support, but rather avoidance and, as a matter of fact create more problems, by
far, than they solve.
I sit here now, writing about what's
happening and what's not happening and
I say we're now at a turning point.
Are we going to get it, and succeed or
limp into oblivion?
Most people just want to tell you what
somebody else isn't doing, they don't particularly want to do anything
themselves because, my God, that would make them responsible, and we all know,
you don't want that
God help us.
Now (2/13/97) 9:30 PM
Joe Mancuso's 10 Line, by the way, got
installed around the end of August 1997 and Joe, with a surprise move on a trip
to Alaska, phoned in his resignation as the interest rate on lump sum
retirement funds plunged to 5.4%.
The original supply capacity issue
surfaced again, and again the cost/capacity model indicated we have ample
supply, while the dispatchers and operations folks say different.
Planning has no clue.