Electrician’s Log: Bearington Plant
Month 1: Three Months to Nothing
Week 1 The suits are in full panic mode. Mr. Rogo (Alex), the plant manager, looks sick. That big division manager, Peach, was here screaming about a late order. I heard the entire floor needs to be turned around in three months, or they shut us down. Three months. That means my job is gone just as summer hits.
We just worked a brutal shift rushing parts for that special Peach order. They had us hand-carrying parts one by one to assembly after the NCX-10 (that big, expensive lavender machine) finally finished them. It’s crazy. We are always running fast, everyone busy all the time, but nothing is on time. How can we be so busy and so inefficient at the same time? It makes no sense.
Week 3 Alex and the senior crew have been meeting constantly with old Lou, the accountant, and Bob Donovan, the production boss. They are talking about things like ‘bottlenecks’ and why we can’t make money. Alex apparently thinks running a plant where everyone works constantly is a sign of being “very inefficient.” I don’t get it. If I’m not working, I’m not earning my pay. They are contradicting everything we’ve been told for years about maximizing our time.
Week 4 They’ve singled out the NCX-10 and the Heat-Treat furnaces as the culprits. They call them the 'Herbies' because they are the slowest part of the line. The managers figured out that if those two machines stop, even for a coffee break, the whole factory loses out. They even worked out the cost: $2,735 an hour if one of those big machines isn’t running. That puts a completely different spin on things. My old machine might only cost us a few dollars an hour if it's idle, but the NCX-10 costs the company millions if it stops for a lunch break.
Comment: They are finally looking where the real problems are. But why did it take a shutdown threat to figure out that the biggest, most expensive machines should be running non-stop?
Month 2: The Floor Gets Weird
Week 5 First big change: Quality Control (Q.C.) checks have been moved right to the bottleneck machines. I saw the Q.C. guy catch a batch of bad steel before it went into the NCX-10. Before this, that bad material would have been processed for hours, wasting time and labor, only to be caught much later. This seems like plain common sense, but we never did it before. Apparently, about five to seven percent of the material going into the Herbies was junk. By stopping the junk early, we just bought ourselves extra capacity on those machines without spending a dime.
Week 7 The union gave in. On the NCX-10 and in the Heat-Treat area, breaks are now staggered. If the setup guys are working, they stay working until the job is done, or they cover for each other. No more machine standing idle because the bell rang for lunch. They made us realize losing that $2,700 an hour is worse than staggering a thirty-minute break.
Week 8 The new system has started, and it’s pure chaos for the non-bottleneck areas, like mine. Red Tags mean the part is going to a bottleneck, and we must drop everything and run it. Green Tags mean regular work—wait in line. Bob Donovan is running around telling us to break up process runs just to get the Red Tags moving.
The weird part is that they are actively encouraging some of our non-bottleneck machines to sit idle if they don't have a Red Tag job. Our foremen are furious because their 'local efficiencies' look terrible. But Alex says an hour saved on a machine that isn't a bottleneck is a “mirage”—it doesn't help the whole plant ship anything faster.
Week 9 They wheeled in the old, beat-up Zmegma machine from storage, the one we all thought was scrap. Now they have guys running it just one shift a day, just to help the NCX-10 process parts. It's slower, more expensive to run, and older than me, but Alex says it adds "capacity" to the bottleneck. They are willingly running up costs on paper just to keep the Herbies free. This definitely breaks all the old rules.
Week 10 The inventory is shrinking fast. The giant mountains of half-finished parts that used to choke the aisles are getting smaller. It turns out the Red Tag system worked too well. We flooded the NCX-10 with materials, creating a huge six-week mountain of inventory in front of it. Then we realized we were making bottleneck parts that weren't even needed for current customer orders—just to keep those efficiencies high.
Question: If we were busy making things we didn't need just to look good on paper, were we making money at all? It feels like we were drowning in our own junk.
Month 3: Getting into the Flow
Week 11 The managers, especially Stacey from inventory, figured out the tags were confusing things. We were prioritizing too much. Now, materials are being released based directly on what the bottlenecks can actually handle, not on how fast the non-bottlenecks (like mine) can make them.
This means sometimes I sit idle, doing nothing, waiting for a Green Tag job to get released, or waiting for the next Red Tag part to clear Q.C. But when the work flows, it flows cleanly.
Week 12 Big news: They cut the batch sizes again, in half, on non-bottleneck machines. This means more setups for us—more wrenching, more downtime, which should lower our cost per part on paper. But Alex insists this is good.
They explained that chopping the batch size means parts move through the plant faster overall. Instead of waiting for a batch of 100 parts to finish before the next person gets to work, they only wait for 50. This cuts down the total time a part spends sitting around (queue and wait time) by almost half.
Comment: The flow is incredible. My machine still gets idle time, but it’s short—maybe ten or twenty minutes between jobs. Before, I was waiting hours for a huge batch to finish somewhere else. We are shipping products so fast now, maybe in four weeks, when it used to take four months.
Week 13 We hit a record for shipments. The backlog of overdue orders is gone, completely wiped out. Lou, the accountant, looks happier than I've ever seen him.
Marketing is now promising customers four-week delivery because they know we can actually meet it. Alex even took on a huge French order, selling below what the old calculations called our 'cost.' If we can deliver fast, we win new business.
Question: How can selling below our normal cost make us more profitable? It seems Lou is using some kind of accounting magic that ignores the high setup cost we now have due to the smaller batches, because the real costs (Operational Expense) are low since we ship so much more product now.
Month 4: The Aftermath
Week 16 (Four Months In) The plant is calm. Nobody is screaming. Nobody is running around like a madman trying to find a missing part. The inventory is low and neat. We’ve gone from almost shutting down to being the division's ‘gold mine.’
Alex Rogo got promoted to run the whole division. Mr. Peach, the big boss who threatened us, is moving up too.
The entire change hinged on those two machines, the NCX-10 and the Heat-Treat. We stopped worrying about making every single person busy all the time, and instead focused only on maximizing the output of those two critical points.
We broke every rule they ever taught us:
- We ignored local machine efficiency.
- We increased cost-per-part on non-bottlenecks (more setups).
- We used old, high-cost scrap machines (Zmegma).
- We let people sit idle if there was no priority work.
And yet, we became profitable, reliable, and fast.
My big question: If this logic—identifying the weakest link and making sure nothing slows it down—is really just “common sense,” why did we need to be on the verge of closure, and why did a physics professor (Jonah) have to teach the managers how to ask the right questions? Why were we all so blind to the idea that a manager’s job isn’t to keep everyone busy, but to make money by making the whole system move faster?
發表文章
