Agile Manufacturing - Part 3

This blog post is in continuation to the SECOND part of the AGILE MANUFACTURING blog series.

In the FIRST part of the blog-series, we discussed how, my thirst for applying Agile principles to manufacturing landed me at a dream project at an amazing manufacturing firm, the reasons for this blog series and the way I have organized/broken down my learnings at the manufacturing firm into various blog posts...

In the SECOND part, we discussed how breaking down the work into SMALL, INDEPENDENT, MEASURABLE, TESTABLE units of work did magic in terms of costs, productivity and the turn-around time for various manufacturing activities. We also explored 3 case studies.

Let's dive into "Agile in the Manufacturing world" a bit deeper and see how the quintessential element of Agile and Scrum in the software word - The Information Highlighters - can be a game changer even for the manufacturing world.

Information highlighter: The 'Agile' waterfall

Huge overhead water tanks overflowing with water for quite some time before someone switches off the motors is a common sight in Industrial Areas. It wastes the precious water as well as electricity. While people are posted to switch it off "once full", it frequently takes time for someone to observe the overflow and switch off, mainly because such overflow pipes dump the excess water in the drain which is not clearly visible from inside the unit.

I got a little plumbing work done and instead of the overflowing water going down some drain and wasted, it was routed to come down a beautiful reservoir and get collected for re-use, thereby forming an eye-pleasing waterfall. Everytime the waterfall ran, it was visible and audible from a distance, and people knew it was time to "be agile - stop the waterfall!" (pun intended) :-)

Information highlighter: Let there be LIGHT!

The organization uses some motors for circulation of fluids through the system. These are quite power consuming and the management needs to be aware of the run duration. Though there have been processes of noting and reporting the same, yet, since its a manual/human process, there are bound to be slippages et al.

A simple Information Highlighter came to rescue - some LED lights which are an in-house product were connected to the starters of these motors and placed strategically so that they were visible from the management offices - No more reporting was needed from that point on - every time the motors run, the management "knows it" due the bright lights coming up. They needed "an idea" of how much the motors are being run, and that's exactly what they got through this - without any involvement of a team member for reporting!

Information highlighter: load alarms

Some parts of co-extrusion machinery are highly sensitive to load. Any drop in the load damages the end product, while a rise in the load leads to rupture of some heavy parts.

The challenge was the machines had their load meters at a place from where the operator might skip looking at it unless he's extra careful. This was a challenge - a simple slip and the part was broken - only to be imported again from the country of origin. The machine being sensitive, and extremely capital intensive - could not be modified to shift its load sensors.

Yet again, INFORMATION RADIATORS came to the rescue - some traffic signal sort of lights were purchased and installed along with relays and hooters so that everytime the load is "about" to cross a threshold, the light blinks (blinks, not glows - blinking won the operator's attention faster than a constantly glowing light) along with a hooter for audible alarms. Yet again, a simple, low cost setup saved repeated repair costs and time.

Information Highlighter: voltage, current, spike, PF, THD, efficiency et al

As discussed in PART 2 of this blog series, while slicing and dicing the work into small, independent, measurable and testable units, we needed to stub out/mock out the dependencies between various units. We designed the "Zig" to precisely measure and digitally display all the parameters involved - yet another simple Information Highlighter that helped gain the trust of various teams enabling them to work independently and parallelly rather than waiting on each-other (refer PART 2 for further details)

Similar simple yet effective Information Radiators were installed at various stages of the production, thereby freeing up people from reporting as well as avoiding breakdowns and wastages.

An Information Highlighter / Radiator could be as simple as an alarm, a light or a hooter or as complex as a complete Zig. The driving vision was - it should be simple to understand, easy to maintain and provides information that's true, urgent and relevant

In the concluding part - PART 4 - of this blog series, let's explore how some of the software engineering best practices like Automation, testing, mocking reuse et al mapped to the manufacturing best practices and helped improve the product quality.

<< Part 2

Part 4 - The conclusion >>