Process Improvement
Process improvement is one of my strengths and one of my on the job joys. I thoroughly enjoy figuring out how to do things better.
I got my first full-time benefitted real job at the age of 20 assembling voice mail systems. They were about the size of a two-drawer filing cabinets, and had many of the same components as a PC. There was a sheet metal skeleton that all the components attached to, a power supply, motherboard, daughter cards that PBX lines plugged into, one or two hard drives (full-height MFM jobbies that maxed out at 190mb each - this was 1989), a floppy drive, and exterior sheet metal that was attached after the whole thing was tested. The person that trained me in their assembly could put one together in 40 minutes. He used to take 50 minutes, but worked out how to streamline things.
I followed his assembly process for about three weeks when I began to realize there had to be a better way. One of the holdups was having to pickup different tools to attach the different pieces. I couldn’t make the pieces attach different, but I could install all of the components that used the same screw, for one example. Instead of using a screwdriver with multiple tips, I purchased a set of individual screwdrivers. It was faster to put down one screwdriver and pick up another than change the tips themselves. The most common screwdriver used had a #2 tip, and an electric screwdriver was faster than a handheld one. Putting several assemblies side by side on a roller line allowed me to keep the same tool in my hand for even longer.
In the end, after I’d made all my changes, I went from assembling one unit in 40 minutes to assembling four at a time in 20 minutes. This freed up a lot of time to work on other things, such as helping out with the QA testing before the boxes were shipped out.
This was my first taste of process improvement. I was immensely proud of what I’d accomplished.
It was a few years before I had the chance to do something like that again. I was working in the shipping department of a food supplement distributor. I was one of about 25 people whose jobs it was to package products for shipment. At the top of the shipper food chain, just below the supervisors, was a position called Metering. The Metering person had to enter all the shipping information for an order into the shipping computer that would spit out UPS labels and manifests. Hucking boxes and doing data entry, more or less. I eventually worked my way up into this position.
It took about 45 seconds to process a single box - enter the customer number, print out labels, and stack the boxes for UPS to pick up. There were four printers hooked up to the computer, along with a digital scale. I rearranged the printers, putting them all within a single step of the computer keyboard. Previously, two of the printers, one of which was used for about half of the outgoing shipments, were several steps away. This cut the per-box time down to about 35 seconds. The last five keystrokes of every shipment were always the same. Time could be saved if we could just hit one key. I asked for and received a programmable keyboard. This got the per-box time under 30 seconds. I reduced the time needed by about a third. Much of that time was spent actually applying the address labels and COD tags, not doing the data entry, so I received permission from my supervisor to do an experiment - I would do the data entry and a second person would attach the labels and stack the boxes. This took the per-box time down to just under 20 seconds. We didn’t do it this way all the time, but it was a great way to stay ahead of the really busy periods. It also made it very easy to train other people to do Metering.
When I was in charge of doing PC imaging for deployment in a corporate environment, all they had for me was a bench with room for a single PC and a single network jack. I grabbed an unused 8-port KVM switch, a 24-port 100mBit switch that had been replaced with a gigabit model, and a cart that could hold eight PCs. We used WinPE to boot the PC and get the image loading. Once the image started loading, the CD could be taken out and used to bring up another box. I burned an extra CD, got two boxes going at a time, and got all eight PCs loaded with a basic image in the time it previously took me to do about three and a half.
While working on a huge PC refresh project, users could end up with one of three different LCD monitors. When I arrived they had been keeping entire orders together so that a user would get the exact monitor that came with their order. This was unnecessary since serial numbers were not being tracked and every 17″ LCD was the same as every other 17″ LCD. It was a pain to keep track of the monitors because the physical warehouse space didn’t have a lot of breathing room, and we’d have to move anywhere from five to 30 boxes to get to the boxes we needed. We had the same problem with keyboards and speakers.
I finally talked the powers that be into keeping all the smaller boxes stacked together so we could simply grab the one on top when getting a system ready to deploy. It was a matter of maybe two minutes to gather the necessary parts instead of the 5-15 minutes it took before. An added benefit was that stacking the boxes in this way actually freed up some space and it became easier to find the right PC since the smaller boxes were no longer in the way. Everyone’s back was a little happier too.
Those are some highlights of my process improvement accomplishments. As I said before, I thoroughly enjoy figuring out how to do things better.
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