Lines, Butts and DOUBLE BUTTS
by Lin Stone

One of the perks I like best about writing is that I get to interview so many geniuses in the fields I am interested in. Thomas Massey was a genius at arranging tools and machines to set up an assembly line for small factories. He was rearranging a small plastics manufacturing company when I met him.

His system of improvement was deciding what must be done, and the best way of accomplishing that. The company had had one long assembly line with the start at one end and the finished product coming out the other end. After considering all the various products they were assembling Thomas had decided to rearrange the line so that it started at both ends and worked to the middle, then went out the side. There were also several short assembly lines that fed off to the other side. At that time he wasn't half finished with the changes and production had already doubled.

Then he showed me some stars and other symbols that were about two feet across. "So I came up with some new products for them to sell.

"First of all I developed a new way of slabbing the plastic from the original block, using a hot wire. It just melts right through it, cleanly and evenly. Then I use a pattern jig that moves another hot wire around the slab to create these symbols that nobody else has. There is virtually no waste."
Three years later the company told me that the symbols Thomas had worked on that one night now comprised 90% of their products.

Thomas Massey could move equipment weighing tons around in his mind, keeping the width, depth, and height completely balanced in his mind with any odd shapes and protuberances. For lesser mortals to understand what his plans would accomplish he had to show them how small models lined up. Then the response would be, "AHHH!"

Given the right lines opens up systematic reproductions. An Australian window manufacturer that I interviewed showed me a versatile curved line creator that allowed his workers to reproduce curved window frames to match the exact needs of architects around the world. "All they have to do is follow the line."

Using a system, one rations mixer showed me how to improvise an operation according to the permutations required. "No matter how many different feeds go into the mix if you only have one truck at that location then all you need is one operator for all the equipment being used. One man can park the truck, get on the loader and load all the feeds that go into the mix. It doesn't matter how short the delivery route is, having a second operator there to run the loader will not make sense financially.

"The length of the delivery route will determine the number of trucks that can run before you will be better off to have an extra operator to run the loader. Now you can figure it out mathematically from the office, but that can seldom take road conditions into consideration. However, if I'm standing there on the spot my eye knows that if one truck is waiting for one or more ahead of it to finish before it can move up then we need an operator for the loader. If the trucks are still stacking up then we need to add more operators until they quit stacking up."

Then he told me about the lines. "When the operator of a loader knows exactly where to stop then he can go twice as fast, no matter how many different places he is coming from. That's why the first thing I do is put visible tape lines on the ground that tell the drivers exactly where to park. As long as they are parking in the same spot every time I can have any number of trucks safely coming in. Operators can move to ten or fifteen different locations in a single day and because of those lines know exactly where to stop at each location without hitting the sides of any of the trucks."

Using unskilled labor one skid manufacturer made 121 different patterns as they were needed, sometimes as few as five at a time and hardly ever more than 30. He only had one man that he trusted to read the blueprints. This man would assemble the first prototype then the unskilled labor would follow that pattern exactly to reproduce as many copies as the order required. That was good as far as it went.

The only problem was that many times each day the crews would shut down while the man that could read the blueprints struggled to lay out another prototype for them. He would go from crew to crew and square everything up right in the middle of the floor.

Then one of the unskilled workers showed him how to lay out any prototype quickly and automatically square it up. He did it with lines. "These lines are always square. Therefore if you line up your prototype with them your prototype will always be square, automatically. By putting measurements on the lines you can square up the cross boards automatically too." From that day forward they never had another crew waiting around for the next prototype to be made.

After seeing the improvement that came from those lines the owner developed jigs and double-sided jigs for the end boards. "Push these jigs into place and the boards are butted automatically into the right place. Bingo. Nail her down."

What do you do when the untrained eye can't tell the difference?

That's when you give the untrained eye something that it can see.

One multi-million dollar plastics company had eighty nine different products with minute differentiating qualities that took months and even years for accurate recognition patterns to develop in new workers. Again and again the wrong products would be mixed with orders ready for shipment, necessitating long delays while Quality Control sorted out the mess.

After the company had struggled with the problem for years an untrained worker suggested that the foreman mark the different baskets with color-coded placards. Thereafter the products which collected in baskets with blue placards were deposited into larger baskets with the same blue placard on the side. People couldn't see any difference in the product, but the placard was visible and identifiable to everyone. Overnight the problem of mixed products went away and never happened again.

This same principle can help the blind to see and the deaf to hear.

Another problem that company had was the time and resources required for adequate quality control. Thirteen lines of inspectors would sort out the good and throw away the bad. When one product got isolated, the same untrained worker noticed that after the same machine had gone through three cycles then the quality control required had dropped progressively to almost nil. In other words, 99% of the bad products came from the first batch. But that didn't matter because the company had ALL of the product being dropped into the same basket and the bad product still had to be sorted out. Therefore he created a tool that he called a PREPONDERATOR.

His Preponderator let the production operator separate the first 100 product directly to an inspection line operator. Depending on results the Preponderator could be adjusted to give 90, 80 or 70 out of 100 products to the top inspection line operator. Again, depending on results and correction efforts in the manufacturing process, the Preponderator was adjusted to pull out fewer and fewer product from the production. For a final polish of quality control the untrained worker also suggested that the best inspection line operator work the first batch, then lesser skilled inspectors do the second, and then the general line do all the rest. As a result quality control actually improved drastically while greatly diminishing the time required.

Are there any lines, butts and double butts that can help you improve the efficiency of your production? Even in intensely creative work the answer is yes. Anything you do twice should only have to be done once. Creating my signature or resource box has always been my weakest part of every article. Finally I'd had enough working for nothing and began to hammer one out and kept it ready for insertion on any articles I wrote. No one signature works for every article so any time I feel constrained to create a new signature for a different article I save the new one too. Now I have eight POWERFUL signatures with clear cut purposes to choose from.

Here's another example: By filling out web pagees according to a formula -- table of text -- ad -- table of text -- ad I can produce ten in the time it once took me to produce one. For each section of all of my web sites I have the tables already set up on a MAKE READY PAGE. In the first table I patch in up to 200 words. In each succeeding table I patch in up to 400 words. At the most it takes only five minutes to have a new article patched in -- and that includes making the header and patching in the author's essential resources. Yes, there is software out there that will do this for me automatically, but when it finishes you've either got lopsided pages -- or thoughts have been broken up and continuity destroyed.

My Make Ready Page for each section is also set up so that I can change the background for every article in the entire section with one little click.

When you save time you make money. Maybe you're not a Thomas Massey, but you can still draw out a representation of the challenges in your life and work methodically to clear them. The results are definitely worth it.



Independently less than wealthy, Lin Stone offers you:



Professional help for your writing
Publishing FREE books
that are PRICELESS!
Free
Adventure Kits from Every State and shows you how to
protect everything you should insure.

Posted for Lin by http://Articles411.com Webmaster, Laurie Meade

Article Source: http://articles411.com