The Voices of Manufacturing
Aug 3, 2021
Welcome to The Voices of Manufacturing
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Brian has spent over a decade working with manufacturers from innovative startups, like Tesla, to established and sophisticated manufacturers, like 3M. We're excited to launch this show and give voice to the real people behind this fascinating industry.
Stay tuned for next week's episode, where we'll be interviewing Jim Vinoski a writer from Forbes who specializes in all things manufacturing. We'll be discussing how to attract to right kind of talent and maintain a qualified workforce.
More episodes from The Voices of Manufacturing
Sep 6, 2023
From Flame To Flourish: End Firefighting w/ Continuous Improvement
Andrew Murphy was brought into the company to help Norman Noble mature from a job shop with a mom & pop structure to a corporate structure. We discuss how Andrew and his team are implementing lean manufacturing and changing the company culture along with the tools and systems they use.
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Aug 17, 2023
Equipping Your Frontline for a Digital Future
Show notes:
14:48 -- We're under the work mindset that we can teach them how to use those things. If they have the mindset that we want to come to work. We want to do the right things. We're already ahead of the game at, at that point, we feel that we can teach people how to do almost anything."
18:22 -- "Our training center is relatively new. It's been around for about five years. It was something that myself and the team put together. I was in a different role. I was in quality and we were trying to resolve problems. After the issue had happened, we'd be out there trying to fix issues and then kind of tried to go into more, a little bit more of a proactive approach."
18:44 -- "Myself and a few other people started being a more proactive and kind of evolved to a training center. We've got myself and two other managers, and then we've got a staff of seven union trainers, and again, they all came from the shop floor. Most of them came from the team leader ranks, so we pulled a lot of the high performing team leaders, and they have become some of our best trainers now."
23:33 -- "They're more accepting because it's not a solution that means more work for them. And that's one of the things, a lot of our solutions that we try and come up with, Needs to be easier for the operator. We can't add technology and make it harder because they already have a lot of work as it is. Building these trucks we have to make it easy for them to use."
23:55 -- "When we implemented the Dozuki system, we pilot it for a long period of time. When we pilot things, the easy thing is to go to the most technologically savvy person in the area or in the team and say: Hey, we have this idea. We want you to try it out."
30:18 -- "When we're implementing a new process or a new model truck, some of the stuff we're getting into now with VR, we've been pulling them into some of our conference rooms and we have some VR technology where they can virtually walk around in their new workstation. There's a lot of companies put a lot of effort into tooling, and then it hits the shop floor and the techs don't like it."
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Aug 10, 2023
From DIY Solutions To Data Driven Breakthroughs
Show notes:
12:21 - "One of the very first things I did was put in Dozuki because it was clear that without data collection for work instructions, we were never going to be able to scale or move beyond those key talents, those key individuals where tribal knowledge existed."
15:23 - "My whole effort has been focused on how to make them more effective at doing the job that we hired them to do. And take away most of the other stuff that was just getting in the way of them effectively managing their team and people."
22:12 - "Most quality assurance systems are centered around the idea of making the transition easy. So if you've got a paper collection form, I'm going to show you a path to digitally collect all the information you would have had in your paper form. What you want is to transform that digital acquisition into information that you can leverage."
23:51 - "Every activity in the plant now has an inbound checklist. It might be really short, it might just be that I've got that item in my hands. It's barcode scannable, so it's relatively painless for an operator to scan it at this station. I get that notification and use it to update my production operations reports. We now have a backend to complement all of that system's work."
48:16 - "You need to have a champion who's driven by the need to understand. It can't be driven solely by someone having a vision of wanting to go digital. Doing it the way we've done it takes passion, energy, commitment, and that comes from the heart of the people. You need to find that champion in your business."
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