At the beginning of the 20th century an innovator name Henry Ford revolutionised the auto industry and consequently the industrial world with the invention of the assembly line. Prior to that workers walked over to each product, carrying with them the add on parts and their tools. Usually they made numerous trips, switching between parts and tools. A considerable amount of time was taken up by the workers travelling to and from the products. The assembly line turned this concept around to the exact opposite, where the products move to the workers while the workers remain in one spot. By having the workers, their tools, and parts in one place individual travel times are eliminated, thus speeding up the assembly process. Additional, each worker would be responsible for attaching the same part(s) onto the product. By specialising the functions of each worker the tasks become repetitive, therefore, reducing the chances of errors and speeding up the assembly process further.
The assembly line made it possible for more people to afford their own vehicle due to reduced costs and increased productivity; by having more products made over a period of time. It would be advantageous to use those same principles in our work to raise our productivity but that is only possible if your work consists of only repetitive tasks. Project work, for the most part, is not repetitive. Every assignment is different or has varying degrees of differences from the next. If your project does have some repetitive tasks within it or it has a task that is similar to a task in other project then some of the aspects of the assembly line could be incorporated into your project and others’. This aspect I’m referring to is what I call ‘semi-automation’. The repetitive or similar tasks could be off loaded to a process that doesn’t not require as many inputs compared to a fully manual operation. That semi-automatic process isn’t necessarily a robot performing tasks. It could be software used for number crunching or a jig / fixture for product alignment.
A friend owns a small business that designs and makes custom reflective products. He told me that no two orders are the same. All of the products are designed based on the individual customers’ requirements. My friend told me that he spends a considerable amount of time manually quoting each proposed requirement and he said there are times when he finds it difficult to keep up when there is a surge in quotation requests. I suggested to him that he should make the quotation process semi-automatic. He quickly dismissed the suggestion by saying each quotation is different. He said the sizes and material combinations differ between the requests so it is impossible to do that. I asked him if there were any common factors between the quotes for each product. He thought about it for a few seconds and then said yes. I told him those common factors could form the basis for making his quotation process semi-automatic. I told him that the numbers for the common factors could be calculated by a computer programme while he manually calculates the values for the unique factors and then incorporate the two sets of numbers into the formal quotation. A few weeks later I spoke with him. He told me that he created a spreadsheet that has entry fields for both the common and unique factors. He said he now spends one tenth the amount of time on the quotations compared to before.
Another friend who is an engineer mentioned to me a product his company has been making successfully for many years but now they’re finding it difficult to be competitive. He said the competition is offering their own product at a much lower price and they are not sure how to bring down their costs, in order to match the price. He said there was one considerable difference with this order compared to the others. That was the quantity. They had never received a quotation request for such a large quantity before. I noted that they were fairly competitive with smaller orders but not with this large quote. I asked him what processes were they using at his company to make this product. As it turns out, their processes were very manual intensive. For a small order, the number of manual inputs may not have that great of an impact as compared to a large order. I told him that he could reduce the amount of manual inputs by using fixtures to position the components while they are being secured to one another. Similar to the previous example, the time savings from reducing the number of manual inputs becomes greater with increased volumes. The greater the time savings, the lower the costs.
This approach of semi-automation can be used for any task or procedure that have repetitive or very similar actions. These repetitive actions do not have to occur in the same project or task in order to have them semi-automated. Think of it like there are two different products that need to be painted the same colour. Rather than painting them separately in their own production cells, they could be sent to a common paint booth to be painted at the same time. The two separate steps would be combined into one step for both projects.
Until next time!
Productivity Aspects 