Little Things Count

Early on Henry Ford directed that all parts and materials would be priced to 4 decimal places. He figured, correctly, that if he controlled the 100’s of a cent, the dollars would take care of themselves.

How much attention do you pay to the little things in your plant? When you have a 30 second line stoppage do you consider it too small to lose sleep over?

Our natural human tendency is to worry about the big things and ignore the seemingly trivial. We need to guard against this. You are probably already worrying about the big things (and if not, why not?) You need to worry about that 30 second stoppage as well. That 30 second stoppage, repeated twice an hour in an 8 hour shift results in 8 minutes of downtime.

Does 8 minutes still seem trivial? If your line speed is 200PPM, 8 minutes means 1600 products you did not make in that shift. That’s 384,000 products you won’t make during the year. That’s for a single shift, 5 day operation. More shifts will result in more losses.

Still think 30 seconds is too small to worry about?