Every minute of equipment downtime is money lost. There’s no room for slack for frontline workers when every component on the shop floor must run like a well-oiled machine.
The average manufacturer deals with 800 hours of equipment downtime per year—more than 15 hours per week. That downtime comes at a cost, and it isn’t cheap. Unplanned downtime costs industrial manufacturers as much as $50 billion a year and can eat up to 1%-10% of available production time.
Paper clipboards and Excel spreadsheet are still being used as the go-to productivity tools but this has to change if manufacturers want to see widespread improvements to frontline productivity.
Frontline workers need better tools that value their experience and share their collective knowledge. A new generation of connected worker tools will tap into that knowledge, build workforce competencies, and empower individuals to solve problems more quickly and autonomously. Improved cost efficiency is almost immediate.
Information at your fingertips eliminates manufacturing chokepoints.
Achieving workforce performance consistency across manufacturing operations can often be a challenge but imagine if there was a way to easily transfer knowledge around the organization.
Think of your frontline workers as the eyes and ears of the shop floor—their first-hand experience is crucial to address any frustrations or positive feedback about the solutions for continuous course correction.
Their feedback is a key part of the continuous improvement cycle that is built on ever-changing lessons learnt on the frontline. The one hitch with this strategy is that these valuable insights are of no use to workers on the busy line if they’re hard to follow, incomplete, or stored in a binder in the back office.
Share and share alike
Out on the factory floor, the Poka connected worker platform runs on tablets in the hands of factory and maintenance workers where they can scan QR codes on machines and other equipment. In a matter of seconds, the worker is brought to a centralized repository of all the information needed to operate the machine—digital standard work instructions, troubleshooting solutions, checklists, and more.
Now if a solution can’t be found in this community knowledge base, workers can take a video or photo of the problem and post an issue to Poka. Here, experts across departments can offer solutions in real time, often remotely, to find permanent solutions to recurring problems, leading to improvements in productivity—all helping to build tacit knowledge for frontline workers across the organization.
A culture of standardization that spans the plant network
A culture of standardization is key to reduce losses in production that are caused by inconsistent work methods or knowledge gaps—transforming a previously disjointed process into a seamless exchange of information. But the scope for this technology must extend beyond the walls of one facility. It should be enterprise-wide.
IFS recently brought on board a solution to help customers do just that. Poka, an IFS company, ensures data structure is set up to mirror manufacturing operations with information organized at the plant, production line, workstation, and equipment level. This intuitive structure not only makes information easy to find, but it makes it easy to share standard work instructions across sites. That takes leveraging worker skills and knowledge to an entirely new level by boosting efficiency and productivity enterprise-wide.
Bridge the labor divide – spread the word with a centralized knowledge base
But this knowledge base doesn’t just improve the productivity of the existing workforce. Manufacturers are also busy addressing recent skilled labor shortages and are having to focus on training initiatives
Manufacturers often lose time onboarding new staff on the latest standards and processes, particularly when it comes to mitigating safety incidents, but with Poka this can be avoided. Digital work instructions available in Poka can be a game-changing complement to official SOP documentation and are more effective than traditional training methods, where new hires are often overloaded with information they’re likely to forget.
Case in point: Poka answer the call for help at C.H. Guenther
C.H. Guenther identified an issue with plant visibility that was leading to reoccurring downtime events at its South Carolina plant and Poka answered their call for help. The 200+ strong workforce didn’t have access to tech devices on the shop floor, which often led to issues slipping through the cracks. Take for instance the recurring event on one of their lines where the product wasn’t being correctly deposited into the packaging. This issue caused regular three-minute minor stops as the team struggled to fix it. Now three minutes doesn’t sound a lot but when you add these up over a year, that’s roughly 40 hours lost production time.
With Poka, the team created a call for help, including a video showcasing the issue to everyone, which caught the attention of one of the maintenance heads, who suggested a setting adjustment that the workers don’t usually review. With this collaboration, the issue was fixed for good, cutting out call times and resulting in fewer headaches!
Interested in how Poka brings the connected worker to life and how your company could become the next productivity success story?
SOURCE: SLOWİK M. (24JUL,2024). Revitalizing Manufacturing: Empowering Frontline Workers to Reduce Downtime.IFS BLOG. https://blog.ifs.com/2024/07/empowering-your-workforce-the-key-to-eliminating-poor-quality-in-manufacturing/
