Error Proofing

Hello, I’m Gary Shotton, and I’m sitting here in my machine shop. We do ongoing training to all of our employees, and today, I want to just introduce this next video as something that we actually shot and trained, everyone in our company heard this video. Now, I know that you’re not running a machine shop, but please look past that. The idea behind this is to make sure that our customers always, and I underline the word always, get the highest quality of product delivered to their door. That would apply to anywhere in the world, anywhere in your world. If you’re making food for the for a consumer, you don’t want a hair or someone’s hair to be in that food. If you’re making or doing something in the exercise equipment, you don’t want your exercise equipment to break down. You don’t want to have errors. You don’t want to have mistakes arrive at the doorstep of your customer. Please watch this video. I think you’ll enjoy. My name is Gary Shotton, and I’m owner of auto turn manufacturing as you probably know, but I’m taking the role of trainer for the day. I’m not going to do all the videos, but I want to get it started here. I’m going to start on a critical subject that at first kind of threw us for a loop. We have a customer that asked us to work on error proofing our systems. Now, that’s not a-i-r, that’s e-r-r-o-r. Error proofing, don’t make mistakes. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t send us parts that are bad. As you know, if we have a part that doesn’t meet it’s requirements, we call it non-conforming report, NCR. So, we have that on every single part that does not meet the specifications, but our customers do not want to receive bad parts. Critical, critical to our relationship to them, critical to our pricing and structure, critical to our score card that we as a company have to face every month, and every year. How are we doing? Are we doing good? Are we doing bad? So making something air proof is a new culture for our company, and I’m asking you to jump on board like crazy. Get on board with ideas, and as I explain this. Now, in the midst of this discussion, someone said you can’t use the excuse error of a human, human error. There’s error proofing or hey, people are going to make mistakes. They said you can’t use that as an excuse, and I looked at them and said you know, what are you talking about? People will make mistakes. Well, that’s the point. We can’t use human error as the excuse. At the same time, we know that we’re all going to make mistakes. Let me give an example. I’m driving home. I intend to go to the grocery store. I normally turn off to go to my house, and I’m thinking about something else, and I turn off and go to my house instead of going past my turn off to go to the grocery store. How many have done that? Everybody has done that. Well, you just had an error. You made a mistake. Not costly, just go up, make a U-Turn, turn around, go do whatever you’re going to do to get back on track. Your GPS will help you get back on track if you need that, but that was an error. Didn’t cost you too much, but it did cost you some time. Well, we’re going to find later that our customers have big, big, big, expenses if we make mistakes. Now, on this human error factor, we’re actually admitting. We’re actually agreeing that we know you and I both are going to have a human error, human mistakes. We’re just going to stack in a system that doesn’t allow a part to get out of our shop that’s a mistake. Bear with me, we’re agreeing that we have both dedicated and intelligent workers that are attempting to do a very, very good job. That’s a fact, but all of us know we will make a mistake. So, we’ve got to make a method to catch those mistakes before they go out the door. Let me give some examples. Number one, I have never jumped out of a perfectly safe airplane expecting my parachute to open when I pull the cord. I mean, that to me is a little bit on the edge of insanity, but a lot of people do that. That’s fine, but I would venture to say that if I’m going to jump out of an airplane with a parachute on my back, I hope the parachute opens. I hope that wasn’t a bad day at work for whoever packed my parachute. I hope they didn’t forget to do something, their wife is mad at them, their husbands mad, and I hope that they didn’t have their mind on something else, because I’m hoping that that parachute will open because I’m attached to the parachute. I’m dependent upon that. Make sense? Well depending on, I’m going to ask, “are you sure this is going to open?” I’m going to be ridiculous. I’m going to say “I hope I have a second parachute in case that error did happen, that the parachute didn’t open. I might be ridiculous, and I might put another parachute on the front side beside the back side in case my real parachute nor my backup parachute, but my third one, my tummy parachute, it’s going to open. Now, I’ve made pretty sure that one of those parachutes are going to open, that’s what we’re talking about. Because, I want to be sure I land, and live another day. Now, for our customers, at least one of our customers gave us some figures. They showed us that we’re supplying metal parts. We’re here in our shop. There’s different parts. Just like this part, I’m not sure where this parts used, but it could well go to be a critical part inside a pressurized gas line. This gas line is under pressure, I’m making it up, maybe 500 PSI pressure. It’s full of gasoline, and we send them a bad part, a bad fixture, something wrong, that in it’s one little part, one little link in the chain, one little thing, would be the problem that caused a breakage, a leakage, a blow out, a big problem. Let’s review them. BP had a blowout in the gulf of Mexico. It was reported to us that that was a 44.2 billion dollar mistake, killed 11 people. They listed the next one, I can’t remember them all, 8.5 billion, killed 16 people. The next accident at 6.2 billion, killed so many people. The next one 4.1 billion, killed this many people. Whoa, just a second. My parts are going there and that could cause that? Ah, now we know why we need error proofing. We’ve got to look at our systems in a way that we have no parts going to our customer that are not exactly right, Every single time, and if we send one part bad it’s so much minutely few that we rank high according to other expectations. Now, here’s what brought this on. Last week, we had a part similar to this. The workers on that part, I’m not criticizing them, accidentally picked up a different part that looks similar to this and delivered it to our customer. Now, we have one part that we were expecting delivered, but we have the wrong part number with it. We said, “How could this happen?” Well, I came to investigate this, and we talked about error proofing. Just like we’re hearing here, and I said “You know, I realized that virtually five or six people had touched this part, had had the paperwork, but nobody felt the responsibility to make sure that the part number, or the part in print, or the print matched what the part number was. So he didn’t deliver the wrong part.” So, we made a new policy. We say, “Listen, if you touch that part at all in shipping, you are also responsible to confirm that the part is what’s on the paperwork. So, if four people say “Well three or four people packed it.” Well, three or four people would now have checked it. That’s going to help error proof it. Guess what? When you pick up on a forklift a pallet of parts, you are now instructed to never ever pick up the pallet of the parts without confirming that the pallet of parts that you just picked up matches the Paper Burke that’s with that part. Okay, furthermore, if you’re the forklift operator that delivers our loads, the truck on the weight of the delivery, you are to check it again. Every time your forklift touches that pallet, or touches our parts, or every time your hand comes close to it, you’re now responsible in a quick easy way this will not add a lot of time just confirm. Hey, I’m assuming nobody else checked it. I’m the one that has to check it and confirm that this is the right part. I hope you see that this is our heart. I hope you see that we’re serious about a hundred percent on time delivery, a hundred percent good parts every single time to our customer, and a few times, the very few times that something slips by, we’ll know, why we’ll investigate. By the way, we’re planning towards every time we have a non-conforming report, in other words something happens, we’ll group them together. We plan to have a training like this so that everyone in the company that has anything to do with that issue will be properly trained. Not to discipline, but to help you know what’s expected, and help us know that we’ve trained you.