REAL PRODUCTIVITY

Are your personnel as productive as they could be?

Let’s talk a moment about what it means to have your people “productive.” Does this mean, in your eyes, that people must always look busy? I’ve played that game before. The big joke when I was in manufacturing was “always have some paperwork in your hand and walk like you’re in a hurry to get somewhere.”

Are your people so tied up with daily tasks that they are behind on some…or many? Not a good idea, because now you’ve overextended your human resources and they literally have no time during the workday to do anything else. In fact, some employees respond with overburdening with “analysis paralysis,” meaning they do nothing because they don’t know how to begin taking on the mountain of responsibilities.

Bathroom breaks? Nonproductive (but necessary).

Lunch? Nonproductive (but necessary).

Investigating problems on the production floor? Nonproductive (but necessary).

Creating paper forms, filing paper forms, scanning paper forms, retrieving paper forms, losing paper forms, and ultimately creating charts and graphs based on the data contained within the paper forms? Definitely nonproductive.

Many tasks are unmistakably productive: ordering materials, shipping and receiving materials, cleaning, disinfecting, assembling products, testing and inspecting products, etc. Because, let’s face it, most companies simply don’t take into account and measure all the nonproductive time employees expend in the normal course of their duties.

And people looking busy is not productive. Stop putting pressure on your employees to be “busy” at all times. Many times, there is simply nothing for them to do.

And that’s okay.

If you think about it, a person who is completely (and truly) working tasks ALL DAY LONG have no contingency time for anything else. Take an example:

You have two operators who are completely busy (i.e., 100% tied up resource-wise). If one operator gets sick or leaves the company, who has the time and energy to pick up the tasks left behind? The tasks go undone because there is no contingency time for someone else to do those tasks. And more than that, that person who left? He or she might have had the experience that requires you to hire more than one person to do the work!

On the other hand, if you had three operators that only spent 50% of their day on their own tasks and someone were to get sick or leave the company, these tasks could easily be shifted over to the other two, because they have the time open for other tasks. Many people have already disagreed with this philosophy and simply don’t look at this as a math problem, but W. Edwards Deming would prove you wrong. Having contingency times means the company has less downtime, meaning less nonproductive time. The least amount of nonproductive time.

If you have two water pipes pushing out their max and one goes down, how much more can you push through the one pipe? Exactly…as much as it is capable. No more.

So, consider: If your people are performing their cleaning, disinfecting, particle counting, and micro counting and recording this activity on paper, how much activity is actually productive? Just the work to do the job, right? Everything else is supportive, but supportive in the fact that you have to spend extra time to create the forms, purchase the paper, purchase ink and toner, physically file away the paper in filing cabinets that must be purchased (and that take up space), retrieving paperwork, and transposing numbers from (sometimes) a great deal of paper to get all of the data needed for outputting reports.

This is unnecessary time spent on performing tasks that take away from real productive activities, when you could be using an application that eliminates the nonproductive time spent “processing” the paper forms.

Clean Spaces is uniquely designed to have your personnel do their jobs, record their data, and walk away. All the rest of the activities spent unproductively are automated, ready for presenting immediately after the employee saves the data transaction…no more processing paperwork. This not only returns contingency time to your employees, but it gives your Quality Assurance the immediate ability to access the data in a format that they will need to present to regulatory authorities and make the claim of the least amount of human involvement.

The least amount of unproductive time.

Now the question is…how much is your company’s day spent processing paperwork unproductively? Count it up…I’ll bet you’d be surprised.

Mark Proulx has been working in the Medical Device and Pharmaceutical industries for over 30 years. His company, Clean Spaces App LLC, has been involved in developing a patent pending cleanroom management application that automates the process of providing objective evidence to regulatory authorities for companies to prove cleanroom compliance by automatically recording, analyzing , and outputting the data that is collected by staff on a routine basis. Areas to be inputted and outputted are Cleaning, Disinfecting, Particle Counts, Micro Counts, Audit Logs, Charts and Graphs, and training tutorials. For more information on the app, go to: www.cleanspacesapp.com