How to Reduce Waste in Your Daily Operations
Accessibility and Standard Training for Workers
It is common to see variability in production performance between shifts and plants even for the same product on the same equipment. This is caused by inconsistent knowledge and experience between shifts, position or departments.
Capturing work instructions in video format ensures that your approved best practices do not vary by trainer or over time. Maintaining this valuable training material in the Nvolve platform guarantees that all of your employees have access to the information they need, when they need it.
By focusing your training content efforts in known problem areas where waste is an issue, like during format changeover or on cleaning procedures, you will have better results.
Engage Your Workforce
As with any continuous improvement practice, employees are key players in identifying problems and recommending solutions. Unfortunately in most factories, workers do not have access to real-time information related to production.
The dashboard capability in Poka makes it possible to display data from external systems such as an MES. Operators can check the dashboard at regular intervals, in the flow of work, to know when they are falling outside of the target range.
Worker visibility into waste KPIs is important for 2 reasons. First, you can’t solve a problem you don’t know you have. And second, when operators can take ownership of the KPIs on their machines, they feel empowered to solve problems.
Problem Solving
Once a problem is identified, in this case we recognise that production is yielding a higher rate of waste, we want to get back on track as quickly as possible. Unfortunately once again due to training progressions and experience and knowledge, the ability to troubleshoot a problem effectively is going to vary from one worker to another.
Similar to standardised work instructions or formal training content, Nvolve gives workers access to a knowledge base of troubleshooting solutions.
Focusing on the root cause
There will be many times you will not know what is causing waste so it’s impossible to then know how to stop it. By implementing a centralised system such as a Connected Workforce Solution employees and supervisors can share important document problems easily which are related to a specific task. In our continuous improvement section on our platform, employees are given a way to voice their opinion if they feel a work process should be done more efficiently. This follows a process where the recommendation will reach their manager and be reviewed effectively sending notification to the employee. Empowering employees to be involved on problem solving cases is extremely important to the success of your business.
Latest News
