Manufacturing 101: Essential Shop Floor Skills

Ed Ballina
Well hello team, I’m Ed Ballina.

Alvaro Cuba
Hi you guys, Alvaro Cuba here.

Ed Ballina
So we’re back for another episode of Manufacturing Meet Up and it has become our tradition. We are wearing different hats. So I’ll start off with mine. It’s Swarovski Optik. Swarovski, if you don’t know, makes some of the best quality optics in the world. And I like to do a little bird watching. So I have some Swarovski equipment and there’s my little bird. So that’s my story about my hat. Alvaro, yours is much more colorful than mine. Mine is muted.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, well, this time it is. And it’s, as you can see, a Canadian hat because I spent part of the summer in Canada. Actually, I just came back last week and it was a fantastic vacation. We were in the Rockies and  I have great memories. I used to live in Canada for two or three years with great experiences. So it’s always so nice to go back to Canada.

Ed Ballina
Absolutely, but I probably spend more vacations in Canada than any other country in the world aside from the US, and I’m going back there in a few weeks to go fishing. I can’t wait. Well,  welcome to the manufacturing Meet Up podcast. This is the show where we kick back, we talk about our real experiences on the shop floor, and respond to some of the questions that you may have for supply chain peeps like Alvaro and I so welcome.

Alvaro Cuba
Yes! Great!

So guys, welcome to a new episode of the Manufacturing Meet Up. And  it’s August, which means back to school. Great for some, not so great for others. When vacations have been fantastic, it’s not that too great. But we all transitioned and in August is back to school.  So we thought about exactly that, how we tackle this and…you know that there is some essentials that you need to have when you go into manufacturing. And then there is also some advanced things that you learn and you need when you advance your career in manufacturing. So we said, okay, back to school, let’s have part one as the high school. And then we’ll have the following episode, the advanced or the graduate kind of college school.

So for this one is back to school, as we always talk about people, processes and tech, we’ll discuss about the three of them. You know, if you are new to manufacturing or if you are interested in going into manufacturing, these are some of the essentials, the initial things that you need to think about and master for it. Also, if you are a veteran and you are teaching people that is coming into manufacturing, these could be great topics for you to initiate the people you are coaching. Or if you are a veteran and you want to refresh some of the fundamentals, this can, I’m sure it’s going to  light up some bulbs there and say, ⁓ now I remember what I had to learn at that beginning. So with that, let’s dig into that. And what is the basics, the essentials when you go into manufacturing? Ed.

Ed Ballina
So one of the things that we try to do is also bring this to you in bite-sized pieces, right? So we’re going to talk about this  back to school and three buckets.  One will be people. We always put people first, right? ⁓ The second segment will be about process. And guess what? Technology is the third, right? That’s like our trifecta.  So I get to talk about people first, which is a lot of fun.  But  as we talked about this episode, the picture that came to mind, because you know, Alvaro and I have a few years on us, right? And the topic of Back to School, I thought about Rodney Dangerfield, okay? Not that you can tell, we hide it well.  But you know, Rodney Dangerfield, Back to School had to be one of my favorite movies. And I could, so think of it this way.

Not quite Rodney Dangerfield, but the next best thing, Ed and Alvaro back to school. Here we go. So we’re so hopefully we will leave the rest of your high school experience like going to detention and getting caught smoking in the boys room. So we won’t go past that. The first topic, folks, really, really important. All joking aside, right? Communication skills and professionalism. So why does that matter?

Because in any endeavor, including our personal relationships, right? Communications and communication skills can be either your biggest downfall or your best ally. So when you lead an industry, anytime you have more than two people in a room, there’s, and even with two people in room, there’s relationship,  you know, nuances, and let’s call it for what it is.

When you build relationships with people, they are more likely to help you and step a little bit farther than they need to because you would do the same thing for them. So, but it is the foundation of all workplace interactions and personal interactions, as I mentioned.  So communication basics at Alvaro, you hit the nail on the head, even for folks that have been around a little while like you and I, relearning this stuff.

It’s not you know, it’s like the light bulb got a little loose up there and this just you screw it in and all of a sudden, ⁓ I remember that. I am horrible at active listening. You may have figured that out through this podcast if you’ve watched that at any point in time. So I’ve got a little better, little better but active, active listening, right so important, many times we’re sitting there trying to add our own idea, our own spin or counter. That’s the worst. Because when you’re trying to counter somebody, you’re not making your time to listen to what they have to say. You know, the one other thing that I do have to bring up is this concept of professionalism. I think we’ve lost some of that. I don’t know about you, but my return rate on emails is probably less than 10%. Right.

Text messages, voicemail, and I realize some of the people I’m calling, right, I’m calling as a salesperson. I get it but some of the other people I know, people that need to talk to me and crickets. Folks, that’s that’s more than just respect right? It’s about having good communication skills because it helps grease the gears if you will. So I’m going to share with you an example real quickly of where relationships matter, okay? I am fortunate to do a lot of work with the Pepsi Independent Bottling Network and they’re phenomenal people. I also have deep roots in PepsiCo itself. And the relationship between those two is something I really work hard to improve because we’re all in it together. Not that it’s bad, but any way that I can help works. Well, we had a phone call from a facility that had lost a gearbox and the vendor had told them it was six weeks out. You don’t shut a can line for six weeks in the middle of summer. Okay. If you got to push it by hand, you push, no, you can’t do that, but you get the point. They were frustrated, because of my relationships I was able to get a hold of some great engineering support. They were able to contact, long story short and four days there was a new gear box sitting there. Relationships matter. And that’s just one little example. Your communication skills are incredibly important. So whatever you can do to help clean it up, get feedback, active listening, clear message.

Really, really important. So, Alvaro, you’ve got another piece of the pie on this one. 

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, there is so many that you can choose, but I choose a couple. One is conflict resolution and the other is team building. And these are different sides of the same coin.  Conflict resolution is more about personal attitude. It’s about you getting into the relationships and Ed was talking about that with openness and thinking not an issue, but an opportunity to learn. So that kind of personal, approach allows you to address early when conflicts come, focus on the solve and forget about the blame.

Nobody has to blame anybody. We all make mistakes. It’s about how quickly you learn, react, and solve as the example Ed was bringing. That personal attitude is super important. The team building is similar, but when you interact with other people, you know, you alone can do X. In a team, you can do 10X.

And when the team works well, it enriches everything. Enriches the work, obviously, enriches your personal life, enriches your community. So you go into the thinking, I have to trust, collaborate. No, it’s problem solving, ideation all together. Summarizing the two, one, the personal attitude and the other, the team is “and” instead of “but”. It’s not about going into that, but thinking, “but” you go into thinking “and” whatever the other person said, there is value in that. And you can add something and make it better and then listen to the others to make it better. Couple of examples.

When I was early in my career in Bunge, still in Latin America, there was a training. It’s the best training I had. And it was called 3X3X3. So when you were entering a new stage in your career or entering, it was six or nine months that you were set aside and you were going to three different functions. So you could learn sequences and how different functions interact. In those three, you get to work with three different kind of teams, which allows you to practice this interaction with different people in different kind of areas. And then in each one, you are looking to master three different kind of personal or people attitudes, personal attitudes. So it was working in you, in a team and in a function and you were learning in the three. Imagine after those three months, six months, nine months, you were so much enriched and helpful.

And one big, quick example, when we were in North America and we had to turn around North America, we all came together and we said, what we can do. And we all came together with new culture, new values, new behaviors that we all had to embrace to make this to happen. And guess what was the theme, that we came for the entire campaign? It was I can, my personal attitudes, we will, the team attitudes, and it’s our time. Let’s make it happen. And that allows to put all together and focus, and we made a huge hell of a turnaround.

Ed Ballina
You know, Alvaro, this is, this whole conflict resolution is such a key topic because many of us in industry were placed in situations where conflict happens, right? If you’re the production manager in a plant, the maintenance manager needs downtime, right? To do PMs, predictive maintenance and all that. But the production person is getting called from the warehouse saying we’re out of stock. You got to run, right? So you have what they call an activating force, a restraining force.

And if all they do is this, nobody wins, right? You need to reconcile to the higher level, which is what is the good thing for the plant and the business? Not what’s good for production and not what’s good for maintenance by itself. What is the higher good? In that case, it may make sense to ship product in from someplace else so that you can fix the equipment so it doesn’t shut you down on the weekend for three days, right? So very important that you have a way to deal with conflict resolution.

Alvaro Cuba
So guys, you have there some good ideas on people, on some of the basics for people.  Switching to process, I choose also a couple for process. One is the lean fundamentals and the other is the problem-solving. Now the lean fundamentals starts with it’s a mindset. No? When you go, you think, zero waste, but it’s not zero waste only in materials or finished goods. It’s zero waste across the board. It’s how you minimize the time that you are using for doing something, how you minimize the effort, how you eliminate those areas where time and effort is consumed and nothing comes out of it.

Reducing energy, reducing inventory,  reducing the errors in quality, reducing the accidents in safety. So it’s this mentality that everything I can do it with less, it’s better. That’s the way. Then once you have that mentality, you can go into Gemba, Kaizen, 5S, those are the different…methodologies that will help. But the most important is the mindset where you go in. You go to solve something to make it efficient, to make it lean. Zero fat, zero waste. So that’s why lean is so important.

Ed Ballina
And it’s considering waste with a big W is what you’re saying. Cause normally you talk to people about waste. They think, okay, so it’s your production breakage or, you know, product you spilled on the floor. No, the waste you’re talking about, we’re talking about is the big W. Waste exists everywhere. It could be time. It could be material, et cetera. So going after that big,

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, the big waste, all the fat needs to come out. And the second is related to that because it’s problem solving. If you go thinking lean, every place you go, you’ll find opportunities to improve. But for that, there is some methodology in problem solving. You just don’t jump to it and say ⁓ I know the root cause, I’m going to fix it. You know what? 95% of the times you’re wrong. Yeah, because there is a method. No, you need to get the right data. Then you need to plan the way, then you need to do it, then you need to check, go back, fix the pieces.

Alvaro Cuba
And the basic is you need to really understand what the issue is and not just jumping it and trying to solve something that for sure or most probably is not going to be the true root cause. You can use five whys, root cause analysis and everything and all that. I always, I think I mentioned before, I don’t know, but when you start TPM, the basic, after you think about people and organization and the cultural part, the very first part is you get all the team, you get the line that you are going to work and you disassemble the entire line all together. And you do that not only to clean, you do that to understand what is the full issues of the line. By the time you put it back together, you now really know what is the problem, where is the fat, where is the waste, where is the inefficiency, and then you can start doing the problem solving, but now you have the real reasons, and then you can go and do times and motions and different studies, but  doing that is essential to really make progress in manufacturing.

Ed Ballina
Yeah, always a little something, something. I’m going to talk about KPIs and financial literacy. But to Alvaro’s point, hey, look, folks, when you have a problem in the plant sometimes the first thing you jump at is a symptom. So you go track the symptom down, you’re not chasing it back far enough to find what the root cause is. And when you problem solve, you have two choices. You can use a shotgun or a hand grenade and hope you hit something or you can use the data to Alvaro’s point and point the sniper’s rifle where you know you’re going to hit your target. So, anyway, I’m the real passion about this problem solving stuff. So yes, not at all. So KPIs.  Look, if you don’t measure your business, how do know if you’re winning or losing? Right? Who attends a basketball game where they don’t keep score?

So the first thing that’s really, really important is to understand the importance of measurement. And maybe you don’t have to be perfect from the beginning, right? But start measuring that particular parameter that you are interested in understanding, right? That becomes your KPI. And trust me, what gets measured gets followed. What’s important to your boss, right? You will adopt because that’s what they’re looking at to tell them whether you’re winning or losing. So it’s important to understand those KPIs. So here’s a bunch of them. If you’re in operations, OEE, right? That’s called by different names in different companies, right? Operational efficiency, total efficiency, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s a notion that your lines have 24 hours a day, seven days a week of operating time, right? How much of that are you using? Truthfully, right?

Now in some plants you don’t run seven days a week, but you still got to hold yourself accountable for when you intend to run. When you have a schedule that says you’re going to run 87 hours this week, you hold yourself accountable for those 87 hours. Right? So OEE very important. Waste as a category. Now I’m going to go waste with the little W, not the big W like Alvaro talked about. I’m talking about product spillage. I’m talking about production breakage. Your line has a jam, right? Or you overfill your containers. I spent a lot of time making sure that we properly fill our containers and not overfill because we’re not good enough to keep it nice and narrow.

So yields, waste, really important, right? What’s your cost per unit? If you’re an operator and you don’t know what your CPU is, that’s a problem.  What’s your productivity? How about percent overtime, right? It’s not just because of the money, but when you start working your folks with a lot of overtime hours, they’re fatigued. They’re tired. Right? So, so that’s an example. And what’s important, you know, the financials, as I mentioned, you need to know down cold, right? Somebody asks you how much you spend on R&M, you should be able to rattle off two and a half cents a case or whatever the case may be.  But KPI, some of these financial indicators, they are lagging, right? By the time you see your P&L at the end of the month, of the period, this, you know, the horses are out of the barn people, you already spent that money. So that’s why you want to see what’s happening along the way. How are my yields on a daily basis?

So quick example, in one facility that I was involved in, we had horrendous fill performance on our can line. We were wasting a lot of product and we were measuring, you know, like a couple of times a shift. We had to go deep and actually measure the performance of every valve on that filler three times so that it would be statistically valid and we could do statistical process control and we were able to reduce our waste by $200,000 a year and run rated speeds. Again, understand your KPIs, dive deep, and always, always understand your costs.  So, and now we get to talk about the fun stuff, technology.

Alvaro Cuba
After people and after process.

Ed Ballina
That’s exactly right. So I I’m going to jump in here and talk about IoT and AI, right? So famous letters.

Alvaro Cuba

Go ahead, Ed. What are some of the basics? Yes, famous words all over the internet these days.

Ed Ballina
Hey, listen, if you’re not flashing those letters, you’re just not with it. Well, the real message here, folks, is to continually educate, right? Be a person of intellectual curiosity, right? Because if you’re still dealing with yesterday’s technology and you don’t understand what’s coming your way, you’re a dinosaur. I’m sorry. OK, your competition is going to eat you. You will become extinct.

Because guess what? They are embracing the new technology and they’re taking advantage of it. So IOT. What is IOT? That was kind of the first big splash into this whole, you know, AI world. We were promised the Internet of Things. Everything’s connected. Remember, Alvaro, big data. ⁓ we’re going to deal with big data. Well, big data scared the crap out of me because big data got thrown at me like a fire hose. And I didn’t know what to do with the big data.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah.

Ed Ballina
But you need to gather the data and then provide it to an AI system, which is essentially machine learning. So you put all this information in, it besides just the data, it pulls from a lot of different  areas, and it gives you the best possible thinking on how to solve a particular problem.  So Internet of Things, connected devices that allow us to interact with them.

Whether you’re in Shanghai or the Congo and it’s all available, you can see your whole enterprise, right? That’s wonderful. That’s drinking from a fire hose. That’s where you need AI, where now you create intelligence and actionable insights instead of a bunch of information.  So quick little example where  what may sound simple, you can save the company a lot of money. So  those of you that don’t deal with the truck industry or the Department of Transportation may not know that every professional driver has to conduct a pre-trip inspection before he or she gets behind that wheel. They’re fairly comprehensive. It could be 20, 30 minutes, right, depending on what you’re driving. By the way, forklift drivers, material handling equipment in the plants also require pre-trip. So it’s not just commercial drivers.

In the best of companies, it’s somebody with a digital device, right? Checking off. Is your tire good? Are your connections tight, et cetera, right? And the better companies,  you’re using a digital device. In other companies, it’s a form. It’s a piece of paper with a pencil, right? Now, the truck driver has to use his or her hands to perform some of these checks. So that gets left on the ground. It takes extra time. A company came out with a way to do that with voice technology, okay? Where it’s a wearable device, the system will tell the driver, will give them directed, go to the tires, check your tire pressure, check your lubricant. They were able to cut 15 minutes of every pre-trip inspection, every shift. Can you imagine what that’s worth? The concept sounds simple, it’s hard to execute. Trust me, the AI behind this is pretty amazing stuff, but something as simple as that, automating that can have profound effects on the productivity of your people. That was an example. Now Alvaro is going to give you a deeper dive into this stuff.

Alvaro Cuba
I don’t know how deep, but anyhow, it’s related to what we were talking about in process. Imagine if you can save time here, save time there, save time ways here, ways there. That’s the entire concept. What happens is technology, as Ed was saying, it’s making things that were very difficult in the previous life much, much easier and much more productive.  So one example is machine health, which is for me is the basic. When you go into a plant or taking Ed’s example on the trucks or the forklifts, if the truck is not working, the engine is not starting or the forklift is not charged.

You cannot do anything. You are thinking, I’m going to make it this efficient, more routes and whatever, if the truck is not working. Same happens with the lines. You can think about process improvement. You can think about production health and product health. But if your line is not responsive and efficient, the rest you will never get to that. So I remember when I started  to check how the machine health, we had one guy going around the plant, checking vibration, putting a note. He was checking the equipment probably once a week. No?

And checking if it was vibrating or not, if it was overheating or not. Okay. IoT, AI, what Ed was describing, now you can do it real time, infinite times, every minute. And then you can track perfect the sensing. And then you can…get all the sheer amount of data and send it to the AI machines. And then you get back the analytics of where you can do it, how you can do it. So imagine before machine health, have this one point on the machine once a week. You had to do corrective maintenance basically. Then it came preventive. Okay, I’m going to do it once a month. Now you have this data and tells you that you don’t need to touch it for six months. And they are going to tell you when you should touch it. Can you imagine how much time, effort, spare parts, inventories, and you are saving? So that’s a true example of what it is possible today. And that’s only the start because then it comes with that data, can start that automating and then you can start making the machine to do the things you want to do, not only to tell you for you to go and tune up this or turn off that or do that. It can do it automatically, which is the next generation. So as Ed was saying, AI, it’s critical. We all need to jump into this because it’s here and we have to do it. And when you are talking about manufacturing, Ed and I, we talked this several times, where you should start in machine health. That should be the first step. No, and Ed and I talked a lot about that.

So what we tried in this episode, as you saw, is some of the basics in people when you go to a manufacturing site, in process, what to think first, and now the technology is here and so amazing technology, where you should start. So we…try with this to come to the very basics as we were saying at the beginning. If you are interested in manufacturing, especially in these times where we need more people in manufacturing, we need to attract people. If I can go to them and tell them, in people you are going to gain all these skills in process. Look how interesting and amazing process you can have. And on top of that, especially for the new generations, it’s full technology. And all you can do, it’s a great way to start training people, start mentoring, start… But it’s also a great way to attract people into manufacturing.

Ed Ballina
Yeah. This is about continually learning and growing as a leader, right?  We have learned things over the years that we’ll forget, right? The light bulb that’s loose and you got to screw it back on, right?  So that’s good. But it’s about learning new things. I was commenting to someone the other day,  well, my degree was in chemical engineering. Most of my life has been spent dealing with mechanical stuff.  But the last seven or eight years, I have learned so much about AI and predictive maintenance and it really has made me grow as a manufacturing leader. We just took it to high school. Okay. We gave you just the tip of the iceberg of some things that we think are important skills for you to have. So, but it’s about growth. It’s about reinventing yourself and rebirth. So anyway, I hope you take the opportunity to take some of these courses and pick up some of these capabilities. 

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, yeah, I think we all have to do it. No, and it’s a continuous learning and what it’s coming is exponential. So every day we learn much more. So ⁓ friends, pals, folks, that’s a wrap up time. I hope, we hope that you enjoyed this episode. We really want to thank you for joining us and ⁓Please, if you were ⁓ watching this on YouTube, subscribe or write us a review. If you are listening to iTunes, please give us a review. And more important, talk to your pals, bring them to the Meet Up. Ed is promising a real full bar for us to meet. So we’re looking forward to that. And  for now, let’s continue to meet up remotely, but bring your pals.

Ed Ballina
Fantastic. Yes, ⁓ we may actually do one of these at a bar as Alvaro alluded to, which I think would be really, really cool. If you think sometimes we get off track and we got a little wacky folks, this is drinking water and coffee and juice. OK, so we’re going to wrap it up. If you like, you keep this conversation going. Email us at mmu@augury.com. We’ll also have those links in the  notes for the episode. See you next time.

Alvaro Cuba
Bye folks.