Podcast: Error proofing in manufacturing — Measuring and improving factory performance for greater efficiency

Ryan Kuhlenbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Pico MES, a company that specializes in digital manufacturing technology. During his career, Ryan has worked for a variety of automotive manufacturers, including General Motors, Tesla, and Alta Motors, and experienced firsthand the real-world issues created by the manufacturing digital divide. Greg Whitt is a process improvement engineer at MORryde, which manufactures a wide range of products geared toward motorhomes and towables. In his position, Whitt helps MORryde find areas in which to gain additional value.

Ryan and Greg recently spoke at IndustryWeek’s Operations Leadership Summit in June. During the panel, “Mid-Sized Auto Factory Adopts Digital Assembly for Error-Proofing,” the two discussed how midsized factories can transition from manual to digital manufacturing—starting with the shop floor. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Scott Achelpohl, managing editor of Smart Industry, shares the audience questions and expert answers from the session.

Below are some key quotes from the podcast:

So, for us, a lot of the starting points, when we head into the shop floor, are just managing the chaos. You've got people, machines, tools, all kinds of different things that are all happening at the same time and have to work in perfect harmony to not make a mistake, to produce with quality, but also produce efficiently, price point wise, and then make the company competitive. Everything from simple things like scanners and printers all the way up to DC nutrunners and all kinds of air tools and things in between exist in all of our factories, at least on the assembly side. So, the key that we kind of recognize in the world is it's pretty rare to have a 3%, 5%, or 10% improvement opportunity. I believe that most opportunities are actually small, and you need to get a lot of them to really move the needle. So, it's a death by 1,000 cuts problem. How do I get 30%? 1% at a time, day in and day out, whether it's helping an individual worker perform a task or a technology that's feeding back data into a continuous improvement loop that can solve a different issue. How do you manage your people, on the one side, whether it's training or just executing standard work? What about the equipment that they use that’s integrated into their days? And then the data that connects it all together, both to validate you built the thing, but also identify where the opportunities are for future improvements so that you're constantly growing. 

So, when we're error proofing systems or we're thinking about how do you balance people, tools, and data together, we use the common theme of error proofing, but really it's all tied into that continuous improvement function. So, people need to know what it is they're supposed to do, and that can happen in a lot of ways. Often, you don't need a screen in front of them to manage that, but you need something that says, “This is what standard work looks like,” so that you can compare Bob and Jane when they're doing the same task but doing it at different rates. One of them is the right way and the other one might learn from that way. Or you might say that the standard work can be both, but one way or another, there has to be some amount of people tool in place. Then on the far side of it, when you get over to the data end, if you can't measure what you did, I like that last presentation where they said, “In the military, if it's important, figure out how to measure it.” There are easy ways to do that, and hard ways to do that, but having a system in place that does some of that automatically, whether it's time tracking or traceability data, it becomes really important to feed back into the other areas. And then tools are just opportunities to fix problems, to do things better. You don't have to spend a lot of money on tools nowadays. Our library at Pico, we have a no-code library of integrated tools. It's the largest one on the planet now. It's over 200 families of types of tools ranging from DC nutrunners all the way to air pressure transducers to validate that the airline on a pneumatic tool is at the right pressure, and everything in between can be added. And it's there to solve the problem. It's not there to have an engineered candy store, although that's effectively what it turns into. But each one of those things is an opportunity to improve. — Ryan Kuhlenbeck