I’m a member of several online manufacturing/industrial forums, and I get email updates on the topics being bandied about, books being read, systems being implemented, many apparently representing salvation to the implementers.
Sometimes, when I read these forum postings, I feel that I’m old school in the sense that I try to keep things simple. For example, baseball can conceptually be reduced to throw the ball, hit the ball, and catch the ball. Do those three things fundamentally well, and you have the foundation for baseball success.
Having been on many sides of the manufacturing world as well as the consulting world, I have seen quite a number of system improvement concepts arrive and depart. In my experience, among those folks destined to work with the new systems, there were typically references to the new system being “the flavor of the month,” given its potential for a short lifespan.
Some of them were ridiculous matches for their environment.
Some of them were notably excellent and sensible – I was a long-term practitioner of a couple, and still promote their concepts when doing consulting work.
In my years of observing these systems being implemented, rarely do they yield the expected results – good results, in many cases, just not the business-changer they were anticipated to be.
Why is that?
The root cause, I believe, is that the foundations upon which these systems were installed were frequently not fundamentally sound.
In manufacturing, systems meet the real world in the hands of its people. Those hands need to be fundamentally skilled and expert at what they do – operate, maintain, inspect, administer – in order for the business to succeed and prosper. If they are not fundamentally skilled…
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Let’s say your business needs a shot in the arm, some step-change of improvement, and you’ve read exciting things about a new system that seems sure to get you improved results… Think twice before you spend time, energy and financial resources on that system.
If your employees are not fundamentally skilled to begin with, the results of placing a new system on top will be shaky at best, and doomed to failure at worst. If your employees are unable to properly implement simple fundamentals, how will they suddenly manage to do so with a new process system on top?
A new system is not the answer; helping your employees to become fundamentally skilled is.
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Spend your money first on making sure your people are fundamentally skilled.
When that’s achieved, then consider new systems, if it’s still needed. It’s amazing what improvements can come just from having employees with high levels of fundamental skills.
And if you do decide to implement a new system, it’ll be easier to implement and provide better results because your foundation is sound.
It’ll be a hit – not an error.
You know the old saying: “There’s Liars, Damn Liars, and Statisticians”? I wrote a blog entry about it. Well, treat this as a warning – data analysis to follow. But please follow anyway!
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Here’s a graph, courtesy of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data.
This is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the period of 2001 through the third quarter of 2011. It works out to roughly a 2.5% increase (inflation) each year.
Not bad, year-to-year, but over enough years it becomes fairly substantial. One hopes that income increases commensurately.
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Taking a different tack for a moment, I’ve written a good bit about skilled industrial jobs going unfilled for want of qualified candidates. One would hope in our free market economy that un-met demand would, over time, cause individuals and technical schools to respond, with the effect that these jobs would be filled by qualified individuals.
The current situation is that many aren’t being filled.
Why don’t we have enough qualified candidates? Partly because of the cultural perception that industrial jobs are not a desirable career – everyone should aspire to graduate from college and get a job worthy of their degree. Statistics, however, of high school and college dropout rates support the idea that college is not the best or most appropriate place for some to work towards a career.
We need individuals to seek these skilled industrial jobs, to seek the proper education, and we need to provide the proper education for people who want to work with their hands while exercising their brains.
But do we as a society value these kinds of jobs?
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Here’s another graph, again from BLS data.
This is a graph of real hourly wages in manufacturing, from the period of 2001 through the third-quarter of 2011.
From 2001 to 2011, on the average, real hourly wages increase very slightly more than 1% per year.
Inflation (CPI, at the top) – 2.5% increase per year.
Industrial Hourly Wages – 1.1% increase per year
I know this is cherry-picking (Liars, anyone?), but if you look at wages from 2004 to 2011, they averaged an increase of only 0.5% per year. In fact, it decreased from 2004 to mid-2008.
If you work in an industrial job, you are losing ground.
Why?
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One reason may be that industrial companies have tended to think, over the last several decades, that increased automation can replace skilled people in operating and maintaining complex industrial processes. There is a lack of real growth in hourly wages for those jobs because the expectations of these positions has decreased over time to where they have, in some cases, become what I call “remote control” operators that just respond to error codes. In short, they have become less valuable. The downside of this trend, however, is that salaried technical staff assumes the troubleshooting and technical support role that previously was provided by the hourly workforce. In spending their time keeping the plant running, they end up with little time for process improvement and innovation.
I believe, in contrast, that there is no substitute for highly skilled hourly employees running our industrial systems, and that the contributions of skilled, dedicated workers are essential to our long-term industrial success.
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It makes good business sense to return to the structure where hourly operators and maintenance employees are experts on their processes. While this industrial renaissance would increase the hourly employees’ value and compensation, it also would free the technical staff’s ability to focus on improving their processes – a far more lucrative change.
It’s hard finding skilled candidates for many industrial and manufacturing jobs.
Hard enough, and for long enough, that I’ve been pushing the idea of a “Plan B” to my clients – taking semi-skilled employees who are motivated to learn and training them to become the fully-skilled employees that are needed. And yes, we do create customized training curriculum and provide online all-shift instructional support, in case you were interested…
Sometimes, though, creativity can be your ally in either expanding your candidate pool or improving the fit between candidates and job.
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Let’s say you know someone who worked for a company in industry “A” but lost their job. They would probably be more comfortable looking for another job in industry “A” rather than industry “B”, even if there were more jobs available in industry “B” that were a good fit for them.
Why? Most people are more comfortable with their decisions when they involve something they know about. They know about industry “A” – it’s the unknown part of industry “B” that makes them uncertain and keeps them away.
When faced with something unknown, one response is to stay away. Another is to look for someone you trust who does know about it.
Personal, trusted, word-of-mouth recommendations help make uncertain or uncomfortable decisions more comfortable and therefore easier to make.
An example: hundreds of homes were damaged in our area by a fierce hailstorm earlier this year. Like the rest, we needed a new roof. Suddenly, there were seemingly hundreds of roofers advertising their work. Our previous roofer, who we trusted, was unavailable until late fall because of his backlog. Who, then, in that huge group of unknown suppliers, could we trust to do a proper job?
We didn’t know. Because of that level of uncertainty, we didn’t respond to any of those advertisements. Instead, we asked people whose judgment (and technical competency!) we trusted for personal recommendations of roofers who had done good work for them. These word-of-mouth recommendations were what we responded to.
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So, what would it take to make that person who lost their job in industry “A” more comfortable about industry “B”?
Word-of-mouth, personal recommendations? Almost certainly, but how do you translate “word-of-mouth recommendations” into actions that a business in industry “B” can take?
I’d like to take credit for the following idea, but I can’t – it belongs to one of my clients, and they were gracious enough to let me use it.
They belong in industry “B”; a sturdy but non-flashy business that has a track record of steady improvement as well as a history of treating its employees well. This business has a fairly large number of skilled positions, but has its greatest need in one particular job. Somewhat concerned with the decreasing numbers of qualified candidates who respond to their regular job openings, they decided to try something new.
An open house.
They decided to open the facility up, advertise that they were doing so, give tours, have employees there talking about their work, show the equipment they work on, have refreshments – in other words, encourage people to come see with their own eyes what the job is like, and with their own ears listen to the people who work there talk about what they do.
They had individuals come. They had wives come. They had grandmas come. The grandmas asked good questions. You don’t think the grandmas were there because they had no place else to be, do you? Oh, no – they were there because they had a certain someone in mind…
As a direct result of that open house, they were able to hire two qualified candidates and had several others who were in the process of being evaluated.
Success!
They plan to make the open house a regular event.
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You might think that the point of this is that taking creative steps such as an open house to broaden exposure and word-of-mouth referrals would have a positive impact on your ability to find skilled candidates, and you’d be right.
But another point is that an open house presents an entirely different perspective of a business. Instead of attempting to relate to unknown brick, concrete and glass exteriors, with an open house the public gets to see the faces and relate to the people who work there – something that goes a long way towards lowering the amount of uncertainty for those looking at Industry “B”.
Especially if there’s a grandma in the crowd.
[Warning! Technical post following! Be prepared for acronyms and unexplained manufacturing processes! Hang in there... it’s worth it.]
I was relatively new in my first maintenance job when we began to make use of accelerometers and vibration-monitoring software to keep an eye on our most crucial large rotating equipment. Our new NDT group collected data with a hand-held device and did the analysis using software on a PC. I’ll admit, it was long enough ago that PCs in the plant were still pretty novel.
This was about the time one of my graveyard shift mill mechanics encouraged me to stick a long-bladed screwdriver in my ear. It’s not what you think, and I’ll come back to this later.
I was (and still am) a true believer in the value of predictive maintenance, and for our processes – rolling mills – being able to plan ahead for major downtime tasks was exceptionally valuable.
The first instance we had of predicting a bearing failure was met with skepticism by our old school production manager. Fortunately, he was an open-minded old school production manager, and we negotiated a couple days of downtime. When the time came, and we began to open the rewind mandrel gearbox with the failing bearing, there he was, wanting to see the proof with his own eyes. And, there it was, where we had identified it, a large crack (almost a complete fracture) of the outer race of the inboard bearing. Run to failure would have ruined the gearbox and caused more than a wee bit of downtime, which was a very precious commodity to us. As it was, caught early, we had a fairly easy time changing the bearing, and we were back up and running early.
Independent of, and actually prior to, being informed of the impending bearing failure by the NDT folks, one of my graveyard mechanics waved me over one night when I was in visiting the folks on that shift.
He pulled a long-bladed screwdriver out of his toolbox on the back of his industrial-sized tricycle (it was a big plant, and that’s how the mechanics got around). I followed him over to the rewind mandrel gearbox of the Tandem Mill, which was ticking over.
He jammed the blade between the inboard bearing carrier and the housing, bent over, and placed an ear firmly against the handle of the screwdriver. He listened, nodded, then stood up and gestured to me. I put my ear on the end of the screwdriver handle, and conducted through the blade and handle to my ear was the fast gearbox hum as it turned an empty spool in the beltwrapper. The noise level in the plant was high, but using the screwdriver that way I could clearly hear the gears.
“I don’t hear anything but the gears.” I told him.
“Exactly,” he said.
About that time, we heard the coolant sprays go on, the bang of a coil hitting the first stand, and in a few seconds the sheet came out of stand two and flapped and crashed into the beltwrapper. After about five turns on the spool, the beltwrapper pulled away and the mill ramped up to speed. After watching the sheet wind up on the spool for a few seconds (it’s actually pretty mesmerizing), I looked back and he was listening to the gearbox again.
“Now try it,” he said.
I did. This time I heard a distinct high speed click. I stood up and we backed away to a safer distance from the edge of the sheet.
He said, “It’s been getting worse – and you only hear it under load. Better get ready to replace that bearing.”
I asked him if he listened to all the mill gearboxes. He looked mildly insulted and said, “Of course I do.”
I believed him. I also believed in and respected what he knew, and what he would do to take best care of his equipment (for he considered it “his” mill). I thanked him, and assured him we would plan a bearing change.
A few days later, the NDT folks told me the same thing, but with different details, and we made plans with our production manager for the downtime to change the bearing
The point of this is that there is a definite place for technology in maintenance – vibration monitoring works, and it should be an important technological part of many maintenance programs. Having the NDT prints of changes over time in amplitude of the bearing crack frequency made it easier to persuade our production manager to agree to the downtime.
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A greater point, however, is that dedicated and expert craftspeople are a crucial part of any maintenance program, for their impact is not limited to one small aspect of maintenance.
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Are your maintenance people experts on your equipment? If not, we can help you get them there. Contact us.
photo credit: www.industrialbicycles.com – mover-trike
I first wrote about “It’s Nice When Things Work” last year, but this story is a bit different.
It starts out with one of those situations that happens with most of us at some point, when you make an observation to yourself (psst! you shouldn’t do that), ignore the observation, and, sure enough, something happens that forces you to remark to yourself – but typically also to those around you, prefaced by an *&%#^ – “I told you not to do that!”
It happened during June, when we were in Greece, returning to the Plaka area in Athens from the ferry port of Piraeus via the subway. I was dragging along a very cumbersome and heavy oversized duffle bag, which was fine until we had to change trains at Omonia. The subway car was very crowded and the bag very awkward, and to make it out of the subway car before the doors shut I briefly needed two hands, so I had to pull my right hand out of my right front pocket, where it had been guarding my wallet…
You can see where this is going.
I had my hand out of my pocket for maybe three, four seconds, and in that time my wallet was plucked. I’m a pretty seasoned traveler, never had my pocket picked, and I knew better – I knew I should not have had my wallet anywhere accessible, but there it was, and there it went. I knew it was gone as I got out of the subway car, but there was nothing to do but check the floor to make sure I hadn’t just dropped it (ha), then cancel the two credit cards and get a new driver’s license when I got home.
I was still fuming for a long time – not because I got my pocket picked, although that was embarrassing, given I knew better, and not because of losing cash (not much… had that right, at least) or the cards, but I was really attached to that wallet, a long-held gift from my mother-in-law.
So we’re home, and eventually, six weeks or so later, I get a new wallet to use.
About that time I get a notice from the USPS that they tried to deliver a certified letter to me from the U.S. State Department.
What could that be? I laughed, told my wife I wasn’t wanted on any outstanding international warrants that I knew of, and went to pick up the letter the next day.
It was a relatively fat envelope, and my thought that they had found my driver’s license or something from my wallet passed out of my mind as a potential solution to the puzzle.
Instead, when I opened the envelope, there was a very warm, brief letter from the Embassy in Athens saying they had collected something of mine from the Metro office at the Syntagma Station and there was… my wallet.
With my driver’s license.
With my two credit cards.
In fact, with everything except the cash, even the receipt for a purchase made just prior to the loss, kept where the money had been.
The thief, obviously, just took the euros, left everything else – everything – and tossed it – but not in a trash can.
That means someone – Metro employee, Greek citizen, or visitor – within the subway station at Omonia found my wallet and took the trouble of turning it in to the right someone at the Metro, without removing anything else of value.
In turn, that person moved it to lost and found at Syntagma, where someone else looked it over, saw the driver’s license and notified the US Embassy.
Someone else on the staff retrieved it.
Someone wrote the letter to me, and someone sent the wallet to Washington, D.C., where someone else packaged it up and sent it to me in Tennessee.
That’s a lot of someones, all doing the right thing, which ended up with me having, once again, my wallet.
If someone along the way – even the thief, for that matter, in leaving my driver’s license in the wallet – had done something differently, I’d never have seen it again.
But I did.
Now there is still no excuse for me to have had my wallet where it was reachable, but it is nice when things work the way they are meant to.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone did the right thing?
In the workplace, in the community, in the world. Perhaps we have to set the example, ourselves. After all, it does happen – happened with everyone who got my wallet back to me.
Surely you’ve had an experience like this.
You’re getting ready to participate in an activity and someone you’ve never met before is nearby. They casually strike up a conversation, talking with great confidence and knowledge about the activity and their experience in it, leading you to reasonably believe that they are rather expert. Thinking you might be challenged and learn something, you ask them to join you.
Then you start, and their expertise is revealed to be fraudulent, their skills erratic and weak, and their demeanor defensive with a touch of transference (“These must be old tennis balls! I can’t play properly with old tennis balls!”).
If you are so moved, and I hope you would be, you can be kind towards the imposter, nod your way through some minimum engagement, beg off, and be on your way.
It’s no big deal: just the briefest of lost time, and no lasting commitment or harm. You ran across someone who only talks a good game.
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Let’s change the circumstances.
You’re getting ready to participate in the activity of hiring a new employee for a position that requires specialized knowledge.
Many, many people are looking for good jobs, such as yours, and come to you as candidates.
Many of them talk with great confidence and knowledge about the job and the skills required to be successful in its daily tasks. Are they really knowledgeable, or just talking a good game? The awkward thing is, you can’t really determine if they are expert in their knowledge or if they are fraudulent until you have hired them and they are working for you, attempting to complete the activities of the job.
Or can you?
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The cost of hiring then having to dismiss just one person who is inadequate for the job can be very high – especially if it takes considerable time and resources to do so.
Hmmm. What you need is an objective, fair, and comprehensive assessment of what each candidate knows relative to what they actually need to know to be successful in the job before you hire them. With such an assessment, you can avoid hiring someone who turns out to be only talking a good game.
We can provide that objective, fair and comprehensive assessment, for any job with specialized knowledge. We’ve been developing content-validated technical assessment for fifteen years, and would be happy to help you determine if your candidates really know their stuff.
Or, if they are just talking a good game.
Call or email us – we can help. If you’d like them to know a little more stuff, we can help with customized training, too.
I love dichotomies.
Also, actually, I like that word: dichotomy. Not only does it look interesting, its definition is interesting – “a division into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities…”*
Here’s an example: in soccer, a “hand ball” by one team’s player out in the pitch results in a direct kick for the other team (well, it has to be intentional), so you avoid touching the ball as much as possible; yet the keeper (my position) is allowed – required! – to use their hands to catch or deflect the ball. The dichotomy: hands on ball – bad!, yet hands on ball – good! – same game, same field, just different people.
Here’s another, but a bit more relevant to our current industrial/manufacturing world.
Industries here continue to evolve and push automation (even the Chinese are beginning to use robots in place of assembly-line workers), from the infeed of raw materials to packaging and palletizing of finished goods. Automation is everywhere.
Yet when things don’t work properly, having knowledgeable people skilled with their hands to troubleshoot, repair and return the automation to proper functioning is not just essential, it is every bit as fundamental as having the automation manufacturing processes to begin with. The more highly automated, the greater the need to have skilled, hands-on personnel.
What a dichotomy
The U.S. has stayed ahead of the rest of the world in productivity through making good use of automation. Our challenge going forward will not be as much to continue industrial innovations, but to ensure that our industries will have the skilled hands to keep the automation working
Automation = hands-on. Now that’s a dichotomy
Photo: Rick Fornaro, * Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
I was talking with a friend (who is also a client) a couple of weeks ago on the topic of technical assessment scores and how to interpret them.
While scores – numbers – represent a location on a scale (62% out of 100%, perhaps), they are also somewhat like the title to a book: they give a idea of what the story may be about, but, if the writer is any good, there can be all sorts of plot twists and misdirection before you get to the end of the story. Past the title – the 62% – there is much to be discerned from the plot twists beneath.
Of course, we’re talking about non-fiction titles, here! The role of fiction resides more in forward-looking, “what if we did this” creative improvements – but that’s a topic for another blog post.
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When we design a technical assessment with multiple skill sections, there are many things we intend to determine, but they usually resolve to three things within each skill section:
- Knowledge of how things fundamentally work;
- How to do applied things related to those skills/knowledge;
- How to troubleshoot – think – your way through a situation.
I have the benefit of an engineering education, but that education was made far more valuable because it was subsequently coupled with extensive – and intensive – maintenance experience. I came to understand why maintenance people, during major shutdowns, would on occasion say unkind things about the engineers who designed various pieces of equipment because they were well designed to operate but were not well designed to be worked upon. As a result, when we design assessments, where it is appropriate, we don’t do it purely from the perspective of how things are designed to work; we acknowledge that things don’t always work and look for knowledge of what should be done when you have to fix them.
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When someone takes one of our technical assessments, think of their section scores (e.g. Motors & Drives might be a section of an electrical maintenance assessment) as chapters in the book that the overall assessment represents. Their responses to the questions within a skill section – their story in the chapter – reflects their background and experience.
We can read combinations of education in fundamentals, familiarity with routine tasks and activities, and experience with troubleshooting in their chapter “pages” – in their responses to the questions.
Where this becomes especially important, for example, is when a client intends to plan a training curriculum for a group of semi-skilled employees, and uses one of our assessments to determine who needs what.
If you skimmed an individual’s chapter – section score – on Motors & Drives, and saw a score of 50%, you might think – “Okay, not a good score but not terrible.” But if we read the chapter carefully, we might see the plot twist of a combination of familiarity with routine tasks and activities and good guessing – with significant knowledge gaps at understanding of fundamentals and at troubleshooting experience.
If you plan a curriculum assuming your students have no knowledge – you are starting from scratch – it is, in one sense, easier: you teach everything. When working with semi-skilled individuals, the risk in planning a curriculum without knowing the plot twists within each section score is that you aren’t aware where the actual knowledge gaps are, and as a result may fail to cover them as needed.
Fundamentally, that may be trouble down the line when your expectations of these employees’ performance aren’t met because they didn’t have all of their skill/knowledge gaps filled.
The lesson, then, for determining gap-filling training curriculum is to make sure you know the whole story – not just the title of the book.
I hope it is just human nature that I sometimes feel a brief flash of superiority when someone, in frustration from continued lack of success in attempting some task, appeals to me for help and I can immediately point out some terribly obvious cause (“it’s not plugged in…”).
Hot on the heels of that brief flash of superiority, however, always comes the whisper of a snicker from life around me, the whisper that in words would say, “your turn is coming…”
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I was in a meeting with a client last week working on the topic of remedial training for semi-skilled employees with the intention of moving them into skilled positions that are, for them and for many of my clients, very hard to fill (not enough skilled people).
We worked through the topic of the curriculum, of which I am quite opinionated (we’ll revisit this in my next blog post), when one of my clients said, “Now, all we need is someone to teach the classes.”
Well, pfui.
I’ve been writing and talking for a long time about the need to provide training to semi-skilled folks to help them become the skilled employees that are in great demand around the country, and have yet to write about the next bottleneck in this oh-so-critical process – having skilled instructors.
I think the snickers from life around me were a little louder than a whisper: I’d call it a guffaw.
It’s not as though we don’t have thousands of potential really skilled instructors scattered all around the country – they have been retiring in droves over the last several years, and are doing so now. These are the folks who were expert operators and maintainers, who had experience with equipment and processes before they became operated by “remote control”.
Of course, not everyone is destined to be a good instructor, far from it. But applied technical experience when teaching an applied technical curriculum is essential to being able to communicate how fundamental material relates to practical situations.
We can provide the applied technical curriculum – that’s our business – so the instructors don’t need to worry about what to teach; they can focus on establishing a relationship with their students and telling those essential stories that drive home why you need to pay attention to the fundamentals and do things a certain way.
So, consider calling your industrial retirees. Let us teach you how to teach them how to be a good instructor in the areas of their own best knowledge, and they can make a tremendous, positive contribution to your community by helping those who need addition skills achieve them, and well as helping create the Industrial Renaissance our country is moving towards. If you don’t have a pool of skilled retirees of your own to draw upon, let us know – we may be able to help you find some.
One of my favorite YouTube clips of all time is of Louis CK on Conan called “Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy”. If you have never watched it, please, please do so. If you have watched it, you’re already watching it again.
It is, I believe, a remarkable bit of observant humor as it points out the ridiculous sense of entitlement many people display in their daily lives.
Few of us can say we don’t evince that sense of entitlement from time to time – I know I can’t. I keep thinking I’m entitled to drive on highways where everyone understands and uses their turn signals. I keep thinking that I’m entitled to have everyone in my household load the dishwasher just the same way I do. When I’m, ahem, having those moments, they don’t seem that unreasonable, but when I type them in while writing this, they seem rather petty.
We get used to having things the way we like them, so much so that we convince ourselves that we’re entitled to always have things that way, and when things aren’t that way, oftentimes we end up looking around to find someone to point the finger at as the source of our problems… without considering that we may be the source of our own discomfiture.
Hence Louis CK’s comment about internet on airplanes…
On occasion, situations present themselves such that our carefully constructed self-centered oh-so-local realities are challenged; if we are fortunate, we recognize those situations for what they are: opportunities to realize and remind ourselves that many, many of those things that we surround ourselves with, those things that we like, that comfort us, are merely the benefits of civilization: they are not inherently, intrinsically things we are entitled to.
That is one really long sentence that brings us to this picture:
That was our road, at the bottom of our driveway (our mailbox), not too long ago, after a microburst came through and two days before a tornado came through.
We were one of the few really fortunate families in our neighborhood in the path of the storms – we didn’t have any trees fall on our house, and no one was injured.
We were without power for five days, and were tremendously grateful and totally amazed that we got power back that soon, especially considering that the power lines that were re-strung the day after the first storm were all yanked down by the second storm.
The point of Louis CK’s humorous rant, and the point of showing this picture, is simply to acknowledge that things like electrical power are benefits of our society, our industry, our civilization; they occur because people work hard to create them, put them into place, share them and work harder still when servicing them during difficult times.
They are benefits, not entitlements.
