Justification for Augury investment
As we look to justify the investment in the Augury platform we gravitate towards the impact of significant reduction in equipment failures. We can always look at our data and assume some percentage improvement in line output. This translates to cost reductions in maintenace labor, parts usage, etc. Of course in today's capacity constrained environment, the additional freed-up capacity is worth much.
Some additional benefits to consider are the reduction in waste and improved adherence to quality specifications. The safety of our employees is also a major benefactor; human/machine physical interactions always carry some level of risk of bodily injury. It makes sense that a more stable and predictable line will require less of these interactions and will produce more saleable, in spec goods.
Lastly but certainy not least is the impact on shop floor morale. Nobody likes to operate and or maintain a poor running line. And again let's think about personal risk for our employees. As the line or process beghins to improve, our shop floor can dedicate more time to truly understanding their process and improving instead of always attending to break downs.
Comments
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Totally agree Ed, great post. I had exactly the same experience. No machine operator is having a good day when it is breaking down, and as you say their time is better spent raising performance rather just keeping it running or fixing breakdowns. We took the approach of “chase the waste” and waste in all it’s many forms. The machine operators and technicians were crucial in this as they are the people that really know where the waste is and if you can line up waste removal at the same time as making their daily lives more productive then that is the sweet spot.
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Love the broad definition of "Waste". Sometimes the biggest drags on operational output can be overlooked.
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Ed,
Great Comments. To add some detail to the experience as others are trying to justify the use of CBM and Augury like tools in the Prodution Health space many leaders still face convincing senior leaders to move forward as we do not necessarily have the before and after data at hand. An approach we used was "Test and Learn" with all of our digital transformation projects. Some ideas around this process are in teh attached word document for others to use in their planning and justification process:
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Well done Terry! You have developed a comprehensive but focused "cook book" on how to baseline all of the critical KPIs that will be impacted by this type of endeavor and measure the effect. The time table is aggressive but doable with proper focus. It also helps prevent the analysis paralysis we engineers fall pray to at times.
The only other ingredient I would add to the recipe is a measure of the impact on employee morale. We all intuitively (and experientially) know that a well running operation usually has relatively happy employees. The converse is also true.There are times I have walked into a plant and before I stepped on the line I knew it was a challenged process. You can almost see the look of defeat and Ground Hog Day Syndrome in people's eyes. It's not a question of whether the line will fail but when and how bad…depressing really.
The problem with that data and I am sure, the reason it is not listed, is that most organizations measure this Employee morale (pick your name, Employee Annual Survey, Employee Feedback, etc) on an annual basis at best. The timetable you propose, which I agree with, would not allow the collection of such data.
Overall a simple and organized way to measure the impact on a short time frame.
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