paradigm shift required on the role of operator in small, emerging organizations

In some of the small, emerging organizations, operators who are working in machines or assembly lines are still perceived as Unskilled, and capability is restricted to loading and unloading of components. The other aspects of machine operators like quality checking, machine basic conditions monitoring, tool setting, and parameter monitoring or adjustment are taken by other teams like quality functions, programmers, setters, maintenance crew, and so on.

Here, more than the operator's skill and development, the mindset of supervisors or shopfloor managers needs to be changed. They believe that if we ask more from the operator other than necessary loading and unloading activities, the operator will not do or leave the organization. 

The flipside of this scenario is the operator will soon lose interest in the job as he/she is not learning anything new other than loading/ unloading. For any human being, the inner desire is to learn and contribute and get recognized for the contribution.

when the operator is not given an opportunity to learn more about quality, setting, and machine, he feels the lack of learning and looks for alternative or sometimes accept the situation as it is and becomes complacent.

From an organization perspective, when we have many people responsible for ensuring quality of the product and process adherence, machine basic condition monitoring, the ownership is totally shifted to someone, and they are not fully accountable for the causes of poor quality or poor maintenance. And the cost of manpower also increases, and engagement to the product or process quality becomes low at the operator level. That becomes a waste for the organization.

Since the operator is close to the job, he must be made accountable for OUTPUT, QUALITY AND BASIC HOUSEKEEPING OF THE SURROUNDINGS AND MACHINE. 

when we made this condition as a rule and develop the operator as one point source for improvement, this will enable the operators to learn the skill about quality and machine basic requirements monitoring, and the organization also benefits from waste elimination and reduction.

The starting point is how the organization defining the roles and responsibilities of the operators and the change in the belief system that the operator is capable of developing the required skill if it is warranted.

Importance of Visual Management System in improving Workplace Effectiveness

As discussed in the change-environment-and-trigger-positive behaviour   Visual Management  System is one of the enablers to improve the workplace effectiveness and positive culture in the organization.

let us understand, what does it mean visual management and its components, application, and examples

What is visual management System?

Visual management is a concept of making the workplace more effective by making the condition or reality of workplace more obvious at a glance.

It exposes the waste or abnormality in the system so that waste or abnormality can be corrected or reduced instantly. 

It is not merely putting posters as a one-time effort, and it is a dynamic activity 

Components of visual management system:

It consists of 

1.Visual Displays
2.Visual Metrics
3.Visual Control

Visual displays :

Basically, it consists of labels, identification, instruction posters, displaying information.

It creates awareness or for educating the user about the place/ equipment/ process/facilities 

It can be in TEXT or in COLOURS to indicate relevant information to the user

Examples

Visual  Metrics :


Visual Metrics is one of the visual management systems in which emphasis would be more on to give information about Standard  Vs. Actual.

The purpose is to show 

the variance  or gap between standard vs. reality at a glance


This visual metrics brings down the subjectivity of the people on the information and also trigger the people to take action if there is variance between standard and actual.

Examples

Visual  Control :

Visual control is meant for creating error proof environment by adhering to the right way of doing the things

Examples

How to apply Visual Management System in the workplace?

As visual management system is a creative process and there is no end for improvements ideas. The more you bring your workplace with the visual management system, more transparent, higher the clarity among the team. It increases the engagement of the people.

However, we bring focus on the implementing visual management  effort  through the following steps

1. Identify the area where you would like to improve the visual management system
2. understand the problem in the selected area and decide what you would like to solve 
3. understand your audience or people background in the area and accordingly decide what components of visual management is required. Like visual display. Visual metrics or visual control.
4. Implement and make it dynamic in a sense, it needs to be updated periodically.
5. It would be more engaged, if the people involved in the work area, update the visual management.


As mentioned, Visual Management system is one of the simple, powerful, creative concepts that make people engaged towards continuous waste elimination or reduction in the workplace!

Simple checklist for identifying ergonomic risk in workplace

As we discussed in Why Ergonomics is not given importance in SME organization? a simple checklist with little awareness to engineers, shop floor operating team will help the team to identify the ergonomic risk in the workplace. This awareness further triggers the improvement in workplace re-engineering by the operating team.

In fact, REBA (Rapid Entire Body Assessment) is a structured approach to identify the ergonomic risks in the workplace, the given below checklist is easy to understand and quick guide to identify the fatigue in the workplace by the operating team as we experienced in more than 10 + SME clients.

Ergonomic Assessment Checklist

1.Awkard Posture

2.Handling loads and moving

3.Repetitive physical activities

4.Environment and unfavorable layouts

Why need to elevate the operator's role in SME organization?

In the entire value chain, most of the value addition happens in shopfloor while converting the input into output. Mostly value addition is being done by the operators. 

Some of the common complaints or problems faced by the management team are

1. Difficult to source the skilled operator 
2. Cost of operators is increasing 
3. Operators not  staying for long 
4. Rejections/reworks are more and being identified by the Quality inspectors before despatch

Even though skill gap, supply vs. demand of skilled people are external to the organization, some of the factors are being governed by the organization, and if the organization focus more on those factors, the above problems can be managed well.

some of the problems like cost/quality issues/retention are all influenced by the internal environment, culture and the management related.

For example, driving efficiency and bringing down the cost of engaging operators is management driven. One of the pitfalls we observe in most of the organization is the defining the roles and responsibility of the operator from day one. Operators are being recruited as the person responsible for operating the equipment only. He is expected only to perform loading and unloading the components. Quality of the output is not expected out of him, and there are other agencies or inspectors are in charge of the quality control of the product produced by the operators. 

Also, the operators are not encouraged to keep the workplace right regarding housekeeping and checking some of the basic equipment parameters on a daily basis.

A shift is required to position the operators as the complete in charge of production output as per standard both on quality and efficiency. He has to be trained and instructed from day 1 as complete in charge of his workplace.

Benefits of redefining or elevating the role of the operator:

1. Engagement and ownership increase as human beings expect more challenges, responsibilities, and appreciation.
2. It is easy to improve the quality when the issues are detected and corrected at SOURCE and by the PRODUCER than by any other person, at the remote location and time period.
3.when the efficiency increases, cost of operation comes down

The point is to elevate the role of operators to reap the benefit of reducing the operations cost and increasing the engagement!

Why is Ergonomics application not given much importance in SME organization?

Even though Ergonomics principles and simple risk assessment checklist can be used as a micro productivity tool in shopfloor to improve the productivity, safety aspects, most of the small, medium size organizations are not fully leveraging ergonomics principles and its application in process design.

Some of the misconceptions prevail among manufacturing professionals as we have gathered through our interactions

1.Ergonomics for product design not for process
2.Ergonomics can be applied in large organization
3.Ergonomics study can be done by scholars or external consultants 
4.Difficult to teach to shopfloor people 
5.Ergonomics is more related to Safety, health and environment  and nothing to do with people morale and productivity

In fact, with a simple checklist and little bit awareness on ergonomics principles, shopfloor operators, supervisors, managers can apply and identify the fatigue risk areas and implement simple solutions as we have witnessed in many SME manufacturing organizations.