What does Industry 4.0 do to the daily morning production meeting ?
All of us in manufacturing, we dread those daily morning production meetings, right ? With Industry 4.0, you’ll actually start loving the meetings.
Production meetings the current way
For half an hour before the time of the meeting, we look at a bunch of reports of the previous day’s production, fix the numbers. Then we head out to the meeting room where whole lot of people have gathered, from production, quality, maintenance, scheduling, logistics. Each person has a different set of reports and numbers.
The final inspection guys say they got only 90 parts, while the production guys say they gave 100. The production guys say a machine was under breakdown for 2 hours, while the maintenance guys say they fixed it in half an hour. The production guys say they got raw material for only 100 parts, while the logistics guys say they gave 120.
For 45 minutes we fight over the numbers, are in a bad mood, and for 15 minutes we discuss production efficiencies, problems and solutions. This is the traditional way, the current way.
Production meetings with Industry 4.0
Here’s the daily morning meeting with Industry 4.0. For 10 minutes before the meeting we look at reports of the previous day’s production. We go to the meeting room, we ALL look at the SAME set of numbers in reports generated by our Industry 4.0 system.
The previous day, the system already alerted us to burning issues and we fixed them immediately. So one category of problems is gone. The “I couldn’t fix it because I came to know of it too late” ones. The report also highlights the big problem areas, worst performing machines, biggest causes of machine downtime, and so on.
There are no numbers to fight over, so we look at the highlighted problem areas and then discuss solutions, all in 30 minutes.
So with Industry 4.0 giving us accurate and timely numbers, what do we do with the almost 1 hour that we have saved, preparing for and attending the meeting ?
Maybe go home 1 hour early every evening ?
