“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” – Henry Ford
All manufacturing plants, especially those that produce highly advanced or brand-new products, are bound to experience mishaps and mistakes from time to time. When these errors occur, it’s best to take a cue from manufacturing pioneer Henry Ford. What can your team do to learn from the mistake and prevent the same issues from happening over and over again?
To quickly minimize the effects of the mistake, there are a few immediate steps your organization can implement. Down the road, if you notice continual issues, you may discover deeper-rooted challenges that you will also need to address. We’ll discuss both kinds of solutions below.
Short-Term Solutions
In any industry, it’s important to own up when you make a mistake. This is especially critical for manufacturers that are handling products that can cause harm to consumers if not produced correctly. After the problem is discovered, the first thing you need to do is report it to the appropriate parties within your own organization. Once everyone is brought up to speed internally, you may also need to alert outside groups, such as federal regulators, distributors, or clients who will be affected by the setback.
After you’ve notified the correct people, you’ll want to act immediately to solve the mistake temporarily and enable your plant to resume production. One way to cut down on errors is to increase the number of people onsite who are monitoring for irregularities. Simply having more eyes on production will increase the chances that issues are noticed while they’re still fixable. These supervisors shouldn’t be intimidating or micromanaging to others on the plant floor, but rather they should help where they can and serve as a reminder to pay attention to the work. However, the expense of having more people working at once will add up over time, so this solution is best used only in the short-term.
As another precautionary step, the added supervisors could take time to check the progress between multiple stages of production. Reviewing products throughout the process will help your organization pinpoint exactly where mistakes are happening, and you’ll be able to remove affected materials before they cause more issues down the line or take up wasted time.
When Johnson & Johnson experienced issues with a contract manufacturer that resulted in the contamination of 15 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine, they quickly set these initial solutions in motion. They had to notify officials at the FDA immediately, and because the errors occurred at a contracted plant, Johnson & Johnson chose to increase the number of its own employees on-site to monitor the work and perform additional checks. Had these precautions been in place to begin with, they may have discovered the contaminated doses in hours rather than days and could have avoided such a disastrous delay in production.
Long-Term Solutions
While quick actions can help put out fires in the short-term, they’re often costly or unrealistic to sustain for years to come. To nip these mishaps in the bud, you may need to revisit the drawing board on your overall processes. Addressing the root cause of these errors will be more cost-efficient and provide many benefits down the road.
If many of the mistakes come from human error, you may need to consider that your organization isn’t properly prepping new employees for their duties. Before new hires start their job at your plant, increase the intensive training they receive to help each person become more comfortable in their role before they’re thrown into real situations. As part of this training, you might give them advice from long-time employees on how to overcome common mistakes to prep them for challenges they’ll likely face eventually. To prepare employees most effectively for their unique tasks, you’ll want to make sure a portion of the preparation is on-the-job, as well.
In order to catch and prevent more potential mistakes, employees must also feel empowered to report any concerns they have or errors they’ve made. If your plant encourages a culture of transparency and continual improvement, all employees will feel capable of playing the supervisory role we discussed as a short-term solution. When everyone works together to make each other and the entire organization better, it eliminates the costly need for additional oversight.
To aid employees’ work, reassess your current work areas with people’s movements and capabilities in mind. The placement of the mechanisms and controls may have made sense in theory, but in reality, they could be making your team’s jobs harder than they need to be. Similarly, if your processes still require extremely close observations, manual calculations, or constant multi-tasking, it can be difficult for any human to avoid occasional mistakes without additional assistance. If you can automate the more arduous calculations or give employees convenient tools that will relieve some of their stress, you’ll see the investment pay off with more precise results.
One improvement that can help streamline and optimize your entire plant is an advanced planning & scheduling solution. Planning & scheduling software, such as VirtECS, uses virtual plant modeling to replicate your facility’s unique characteristics and find the most effective production schedule. VirtECS can both identify inefficiencies in your processes and easily adapt your existing schedule to account for any changes you decide to make. If you’re interested in learning more about the ways VirtECS can minimize inefficiencies at your plant, check out our guide here.
