Most manufacturers operate at between 60 and 65% Overall Equipment Effectiveness.  World-class OEE is 85% or better. But how do you improve your OEE to a world-class level? Operational transparency is essential to capture and communicate crucial job data to iterate and improve processes to increase this crucial metric. In this article we'll look at how paper processes prevented true communication between management and front line teams and explain why Front Line Worker Platforms offer a better, brighter future for manufacturing companies through increased organizational transparency.

Generally speaking, communication is not optimal between all parts of an organization. One arm usually isn’t fully aware of what the other arm is doing. This happens between production lines, shifts, plants, and within the corporate structure itself. It allows for problems to fester and ready-made solutions to not be communicated where they are needed most. An organization must  have systems set up that capture data for management and rapidly communicate solutions and knowledge to front line teams.

With operational transparency in place manufacturing businesses can make information actionable, avoid unnecessary risk taking, improve processes and enable true collaboration to reach company OKRs. These are only some of the reasons organizations need to embrace transparency and reinvent the way they work.

Before and After Operational Transparency

But what is operational transparency? It’s easy to describe operational transparency before and after the advent of Connected Worker Platforms as analogous to the before and after of flipping a light switch in a dark room. In this example, companies were fully unaware of what was happening with their front line teams and after they were given complete visibility of all their work processes. This isn’t quite true.

The contrast between before and after Connected Worker Platforms is more closely related to the difference between lighting your home by candlelight and living under the brilliant dependable illumination of electricity. You aren’t in the dark but you are much more likely to accidentally light your house on fire.

Paper processes allowed companies to record machine monitoring processes and the completion of critical service tasks. These paper documents could be referred to after problems occurred and action could be taken. Filing in these pieces of paper often got employees to go to their workstations to do the work. Management could be briefed by their direct reports on what was going on in their front line. They could then communicate this up the ladder.

If failures occurred they could check the paperwork to try to determine why it had happened after the fact. It wasn’t perfect but it was certainly better than nothing. It did however depend upon extraordinary workers to go above and beyond the call of duty to make these inefficient systems work and communicate crucial messages both upstream and downstream.

In short, it required hyper-vigilant work heroes who anxiously tried to save the day. These heroes were human and thus imperfect and inevitably missed things and systems would fail.

How Paper-Based Processes Affect Operational Transparency

For most manufacturing companies the availability and performance of their equipment still rest on paper-based processes for machine monitoring and related service tasks. Let’s look at what this means for a Manufacturing company:

Slow Training and Upskilling Reduces Availability of Crucial Workers

Trainees only have access to information that can be fit in three-ring binders and expertise available on site. It takes longer for them to be trained and they aren’t available to work unsupervised on the front line during this extended period. This also takes experienced workers from doing their technical work to be involved in training. This decreases the availability of machines by creating a scarcity of qualified workers. These workers are also given static training tools to meet a dynamic and changing environment. They are still cogs and not true problem solvers.

Time Wasting Reporting Process

Paper-based processes compromise OEE by sucking up massive amounts of effective work time doing redundant reporting tasks at the end of the day that could be spent maintaining machines.

Non Standardized Work

Paper-based workflows create low quality service task completion that impacts machine maintenance and increases unplanned downtime.

Poor Evidence of Job Completion and Unavailable Data

Evidence of job completion relies only on the human senses. Workers can cheat and file the paperwork without even going to the machines. Warnings can be missed because they are written in illegible handwriting and entered into siloed systems decision-makers can’t access.

Root Cause Analysis Is Almost Impossible

It’s difficult for management to perform root cause analysis and the ordering of predictive preventive maintenance due to the lack of availability of machine monitoring and service task data and its poor quality. This means that preventive maintenance relies on the strength of regular scheduling of maintenance functions.

Conclusion

And that’s only the beginning of the problems that paperwork creates for your organization! But let’s not spend any more time focusing on problems.

Learn how Atheer can help you improve your OEE Availability, Performance and Quality.  Tune in on Thursday to read Operational Transparency Part 2 and discover how Front Line Worker Platforms can improve Operational Transparency and transform OEE through continuous process improvement!