What happened to Experience?

I was recently speaking with a senior executive at a leading food company and he mentioned that the people who were responsible for packaging technology had limited experience in the area. They would use google or lean on him as the head of the division to help them solve issues and run projects. He is not alone and it is a trend that I wish would disappear but it seems to keep growing.

Obviously there is a spectrum, from those who love to take things apart and put them back together to people who learn best through being told about the technology and who can understand how it fits together. What is worrying though is this trend that lets companies think that they will be OK if they are building their products without any experience, that their engineers are essentially trying to read the manual while the system runs.

You might ask why any of this matters, so will provide a personal experience. We had provided a company with a packaging film, and they had two suppliers who would turn that film into a pouch for their product. These are both leading suppliers who are supporting a global multi billion dollar business. We had a kick off meeting to discuss the pilot phase and one supplier said "film ran like a dream, this is a simple substitution, ready to switch over whenever you are" and the other said " this is a complete nightmare, we are seeing weird technical issues like the transverse direction (think N>S = machine direction, E>W is Transverse - pulling in both directions give a film called bi-axially oriented which is an excellent film for multiple applications, hence is wide global mass volume usage) and its not sealing when it should, we had to fight it all the way through our production and we have no intention of ever using this film, its just awful"

Clearly something had gone very very wrong, as exactly the same film should not have such diverse results. But the food manufacturer needed to make millions of pouches and it would be a struggle for a single supplier to do it not to mention a major risk of failure to supply which would be a critical issue. But no one in our company could diagnose the issue on a phone call. We could ask questions and think of what it might be, but that information was not available on line, and could not hope to address it from our offices 4 states over.

We went to the supplier. We stood at the line and watched the product move down in production. We saw the failures they were talking about. We also saw a number of issues with how they were running the film down production. The system was set up a for a more durable film and they had not adjusted any controls - the film they were sending down melts at a lot lower temperature and they were operating well above the preferred heat temperature. They had a slightly older system that had been re engineered to run the newer film but the transverse was pulling film a little faster than optimum settings would state. They also had a production line that had a number of choke points in the flow that were to allow the other film type to best flow through the system but was dropping productivity for our film.

Without seeing it for ourselves there was no way we could have a conversation with the supplier and say , "this is what we saw, this is why it is not running the way you would like it to." When we moved back into physics and facts they immediately were able to understand what was happening and adjust the settings, so that they could make the film with far fewer issues. They could now make the film in volume and speed required.

Experience is so vital to us being resource efficient. The number of packaging projects that are started and conducted without any chance of success is astonishing. Someone with experience could have said at the kick off meeting - this is not going to work and could have diverted funds somewhere with a better outcome.

Once this ripple starts to expand outwards, across thousands of projects and companies globally it is a serious issue. 10 years ago the concern was that the technical people experienced a major gap between the academic instruction they received and reality. However, for the most part they would be willing to get hands on and figure out how everything worked for themselves, so that they would have that lived experience to fall back on the next time a project came around in that area. There is no shortcut to experience, it can not be downloaded from the internet, it has to be earned.

Once this issue combines with organizational issues where each department is trying to optimize results for themselves it magnifies the problem. If the production team dont have the experience of running the material, they dont know if it will work or how to adjust controls as needed, so can face delays, procurement will be frustrated at having to buy more material than needed and packaging will be trying to explain why a material ended up being used incorrectly.... all the while executives will be realizing they can not base a strategy on such a fractured innovation pool and the company ultimately stalls or is less agile then it could be.

The reason any of this matters is that when it comes to achieving the sustainability targets our planet requires of us, it is already a monumental task. We need to retain and optimize all resources, including that most important one of humans. If we can not get out of our own way, we are simply making the task that much (unnecessarily) harder!