63 PROCESSES

26 letters can be combined to make any word in English or any other language.

10 numeric digits can combined to make any number from infinitesimal to infinite.

3 components of the atom can be combined to make any element.

118 elements can be combined to make a molecule of any substance.

63 industrial processes that can be combined to manufacture any product.

Last month I was working in a plant installing developing some productivity monitoring protocols. They told me that theirs was a very unusual process, possibly unique and suspected that I had never seen anything like it before. When we went to the machine I could see that they were right. At least in the larger sense.

I had never seen a process like this before and had always wondered how the product was made. They figured that I would have a steep learning curve to figure it out. Then I started thinking about it:

It had a fairly standard plastic resin extruder. I’ve worked with these before. Not in this context but in injection and blow molding machines.

It had spray nozzles. Never seen these on an extruder but nozzles and I have a long, long acquaintance.

There was a bobbin winder; I’ve seen plenty of those.

Servos, controls and a few other components that were also no mystery to me completed the system.

Thinking on this a bit further, I realized that almost everything I work with uses the same, relatively few processes, recombined in different ways for a seemingly infinite range of capabilities. I said that there were 63 processes  but that is just a guess. It could be fewer, quite possibly more. The point is that there are a limited number of processes we have to know, whatever the actual number may be.

So why is this important? Some of you may have heard the expression “You can eat an elephant if you cut it into small enough pieces.” Sometimes we look at a machine or process and its complexity overwhelms us. We’ve never seen something like this before, don’t understand it and have no idea where to begin understanding it.

The key to understanding is to break it down into familiar elements. A packaging machine, no matter how complex, no matter how specialized, no matter what the function, always combines a relatively few components. Some of these components might be a motor, drive, pneumatic cylinders, photoeyes and so on. These are usually combined in fairly familiar patterns if we can just recognize them. Once we understand the parts of the system, we may have a Eureka! moment where we realize that this system we thought we could never understand is really pretty straightforward after all. Once the mystery is gone, operation, setup, troubleshooting, adjustment and repair all become relatively simple.

This is an important concept to keep in mind when developing training programs for your teammates, especially those who are newer or less experienced. Make sure that you teach them about the basic components first. More importantly, after you have taught them, make sure that they understand the basic components. Then teach them how these work together to make the complex whole.