“Seeing is believing” in manufacturing applies to designers and formulators as well as the executives mentioned in Norman Bodek’s first article on his Japanese Study Mission. His comments about 3 Gen – actual site, actual item, actual situation – rang true for me because of my own experience as a formulating chemist at a company creating reactive adhesives. I have repeatedly encountered how important it can be to be on the manufacturing floor experiencing the process for myself, but would not have thought to apply the concept to executive management.
Sometimes everything will make sense in the lab but that certainty doesn’t translate to the plant. I make my one gallon samples, test them, analyze the data, and draw conclusions. But when a new product goes to production, new raw materials are introduced, or certain quality control issues are being analyzed, then I go stand out on the floor and watch the manufacture of larger batches of hundreds of gallons. Without doing this I don’t know the right questions to ask about what is really going on.
It is not a matter of not trusting the operators or the plant management to follow what is written, but of knowing for myself what is not written and not said. For example, during one trip I realized that a certain step took significantly longer on the plant scale than on the lab scale, which could be causing a chemical reaction to continue beyond the desired point and altering the final properties.
In another case, I was struggling to understand why a product we were transferring from another facility did not have the expected strength. While watching the batches being made we noticed that not all of a key material was reaching the batch – some was being removed via a standard safety procedure installed to account for other materials. Simply turning off that system for the addition of this one less hazardous material fixed the issue. This was something it might never have occurred to an operator or plant manager to mention because it was part of the background.
Sometimes it takes personal experience to thwart the “curse of knowledge” of the front line personnel. They know “it” and don’t realize that you wouldn’t think of that, whatever “it” may be. And sometimes you need to be on the front line to say the right thing at the right time that you didn’t realize that they wouldn’t think about.
I realize that at many companies the formulators are not as involved with manufacturing as we are encouraged to be where I currently work. When there are levels of process engineers and other specialists, there is less reason for a chemist to be personally involved. Even then, a day or two on the floor every so often would be worthwhile as part of a regular training program.
Note: This entry was originally published on a previous blog on November 9, 2006
