Bjørn Mjåtveit
Technical Education Committee Member
EMR Consulting AS
Have you taken the time to take a helicopter view of your business?
Many businesses’ layout is a result of many years of small improvements either by the employees themselves, new tooling in the market, management, customer adaptations or internal revitalization/improvement projects.
If we go back some decades in time, one employee handled the whole repair himself/ herself. Dismantling, machining, rewinding, checking connect ions, testing, painting and packing the motor for shipment. Requirements for the workspace were also not as strict, and unhealthy operations were completed on the workbench with limited protective equipment and tooling.
Legislative and work act regulations have triggered major changes in how we work and where. Today, painting is done in a separate ventilated room, grinding in a safe area with noise attenuation and testing is done in a separate secured area with appropriate safety markings.
Education of each individual worker has also changed, where in many service centers each trade is more specialized and only performing one discipline (e.g., painter, winder, fitter, mechanic, tester, vibration engineer). This change has made the worker more of a specialist within his/her discipline/trade. The evolution of tradespeople to specialists has changed the work process and has led production to a resource efficiency production model instead of a flow efficiency process seen from a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)-lean perspective.
Adverse events or deviations have had an impact as well. For example, when an error or a mistake is made on an order, like a loose bolt, wrong tolerance on a machine part or a bad connection. The deviation process or investigation of the error is not always handled correctly according to the textbooks, and follow-up is forgotten. An intermediate countermeasure is often to add a checkpoint or buddy check to the process, so you can tell the customer that you have completed the countermeasure and it won’t happen again. The customer is satisfied, but you have added an extra follow-up cost. For every order, you have to decide if the extra check is relevant or not, which creates disruptions in the repair process. For a medium-size business, that can be an indirect loss of 100 hours annually or more.
Why add the indirect cost when it can be avoided by rethinking workflow practices?
The industry is struggling to recruit qualified personnel. Recruitment is time-consuming and takes away focus from the daily operations. What about exploring the option of removing the bottlenecks and non-added value thieves in the workshop?
A structured review of the workshop process and reporting can easily remove inefficiencies and employees can then spend time executing valuable repairs and creating value for the customer and company.
EASA has a lot of guidance, training and articles that might help you in the removal of workflow inefficiencies that can be found at easa.com/resources/resource-library.
Related Reference and Training Materials
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