Sachin Gopalakrishnan

We had been facing a peculiar problem; Even though management gave clear instructions regarding priority of work orders inevitably a few units get into Assembly ahead of priority. This was the point when we realized that

WE DO NOT HAVE CONTROL!!

Production was controlled by the process and not by people. This might be because,

1. There was no mechanism in place for control.
2. There was no task and sub-process ownership.
3. No check and verification system in place.

How do we gain control?

We tried to pinpoint the problems. So we came up with a small list.

1. Process Opaqueness There was no way to find the status of the production for a particular order.
2. Ownership problems Sketchy work-roles/profiles.
3. Imbalanced Workflow One or two people in the system were overloaded with responsibilities.

We realized that disseminating information regarding any change in our priority list was critical. Since we were the ones to initiate it we made sure that henceforth we will distribute copies of the list too all parties concerned.

Transparency In an effort to make things a bit more transparent we realized, we need to allot tasks, duties and responsibilities and lay them out clearly. This will clearly show up any lapses in the system.

We decided that a bit of Overlapping of roles was ‘OK’ in case of special circumstances and is also desirable. Special circumstances generally meant absence of the incumbent.

Multiple Stages We separated and divided the process into multiple stages. Each stage was signified by a file and each file was allotted to different people along the process. We also made a proper indexing mechanism for ease in retrieval of data.

For e.g. If product ‘X’ is produced using 10 components and each of them has to pass through the following processes in the depicted order;

Cutting + Subcontracting > Follow-up > Inspection > Assembly > Dispatch

Ownership A file was made for each of the stages above thus dividing it. Each file was designated an owner, in short the owner was responsible for the file and thus that stage in the process.

Essentially the work order document will pass from file to file until it reaches the dispatch file.

This provides two kinds of information,

1. To which stage a component has progressed.
2. Where is the bottleneck?

Now we work on multiple work orders at a time, so at any given moment there are multiple work orders (we process almost 1200 a year) lying in any given file. This means to find out where each work order is we need some kind of indexing system. This is what we came up with.

[The colors are only indicative and do not form part of the actual sheet.]

The top row contains the work order numbers from 1-300, 300-600, 600-900 and finally 1200+. The left hand most column contains text which says 10th September, 20th September & 30th September. The rows are self explanatory, the left hand most column indicates the approximate dates when the particular work order arrives into this file

Each owner will fill in work order numbers in the appropriate column against appropriate sections 10th Sept, 20th Sept, 30th Sept. Each time a work order passes on to the next stage, the appropriate numbers are written down against appropriate columns and sections. This gives us the following information;

1. The ’stage’ of the Work Order.
2. The approximate time it was put in.
3. Bottleneck.
4. Control.

I sort of liken the system to a pipe with a series of taps at intervals. Each tap can be used to control the process, if assembly is loaded, slow down production, if production is loaded, reduce at subcontractors level so on and so forth.

As always we would need to fine tune the system to our needs and remove any chinks and consider modifications to it as time progresses.

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