Using Real-Time Production Data to Build Consensus on the Shop Floor

One Goal, Many Perspectives 

Everyone working in a factory is ultimately there to do one thing: Get a product out the door and to the customer, on time and at the required cost. Given that all team members are working towards one common goal, shouldn’t it be simple to build consensus around top issues, priorities, and problem-solving? Not exactly.

 Within a factory, there are multiple teams with different focuses and priorities: Management, Production, Quality, and Maintenance each sees what’s happening within the four walls of a factory through a different lens. 

 And why not? The day-to-day of each of these teams is quite different. Management wants to drive bottom-line results and keep workers engaged. Production wants to make sure orders are shipped on time. The Quality team is looking for ways to standardize processes to minimize defects and scrap. Maintenance wants to get ahead of breakdowns and downtime before they occur. 

 In a “perfect” plant, these focuses all work together to achieve the one goal. However, without coordination and consensus on top issues, different groups can actually get in each others’ way—or worse, start pointing fingers when things go wrong.

 So how can a factory find ways to start building consensus among all its employees? Here’s some tactics we’ve seen work:  

Tactic One: Use a Single Source of Data to Make Decisions

Just as the opinions of each group differ from one another, so too does the data each group uses to make decisions. Management may take in high-level operational and financial data from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, while Maintenance typically uses a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to gauge how well they’re keeping up with work. 

Of course, these systems are important tools for each respective team, but they also keep information siloed. Finding a solution that lets you integrate disparate data sources into one master dataset or timeline consolidates points of view and priorities. It also allows your different teams to help each other with solving problems. 

MAJiK Systems brings together data from programmable logic controllers (PLCs), ERP systems, scheduling systems, CMMS, and operator input to provide one single source of truth. If you are not ready to automate your data collection and processing, you can still get started with simple hourly Production Tracking sheets that an administrator correlates and presents to your groups. When everyone agrees on what happened, you can objectively and dispassionately start solving your top problems.

Tactic Two: Using Data in Meetings to Reach Consensus

Let’s face it: Meetings have a bad rap. Especially in a factory setting, where things are changing every day and there are frequent issues to address, it’s difficult for teams to even find the time to meet. However, building data-driven meetings into your problem solving process can go a long way towards problem solving while also avoiding those dreaded calendar events that lead to talking in circles and spinning your wheels.

Create an agenda for your meetings that always includes reviewing your production data. Don’t let opinions sway your operational decisions. Instead, review data  together to reach an agreement about root causes of issues and the plan that should be carried out accordingly before you meet again. Speaking of plans...

Tactic Three: Plan, Do, Check, Act

Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) is a four-pronged lean manufacturing concept that dictates how changes in a manufacturing environment should be carried out, and is meant to enable continuous improvement. Each step is broken down as follows: 

Plan: At this stage of the cycle, a problem or opportunity is identified, and a plan is proposed and agreed upon to address it.

Do: In this stage, the plan is carried out to act on the problem or opportunity. This is often done on a small scale, such a single project, to test the plan’s efficacy.

Check: In this stage, the project results are reviewed and analyzed. Here is where the team asks, “Did we solve the problem we meant to solve? Did we do it well? What did we learn from implementing this change?”

Act: FInally, in the “Act” stage, the team can go one of two ways: If the test was successful, it is carried out on a larger scale. If the test failed, the team must go back to the “Plan” stage and try something new. 

True to the concept of continuous improvement, the PDCA cycle is just that—a cycle. It is meant to be repeated both as problems and opportunities repeat themselves and new ones crop up. 

Agreeing on what will be carried out in each stage is essential to gaining consensus across teams. What’s more, using a single source of data (as discussed in Tactic One) allows teams to agree much more readily on what needs to be “checked” and “acted upon” in the Check and Act stages, respectively.

Consensus on the Shop Floor Isn’t Out of Reach

Employing each of the three tactics we’ve covered in this article will help a great deal to get everyone aligned on the action plan to achieve your common goal. Overall, each tactic is in service of a larger overall strategy: Getting everyone out of a function-based point of view that ultimately does a disservice to your organization. Encouraging discussion, analysis, and getting everyone on the same page will strengthen each contributor individually and the organization overall.