NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Question and Answer Session
MR. ALEXANDER: Okay, I appreciate your attending the session and listening and giving your attention to the speakers. We shared some ideas and thoughts with you. We have tried to share some things that have worked and worked well within the organizations that we worked with. Now, it is time for a dialogue. I would be happy to hear ideas and concepts that you have, as well as questions that you may have. If you would, please step to the microphone and identify yourself and your organization for the record.
Q: My name is Premlata Menon, and I am from the University of Hawaii. I have a question for Mr. William Holt here. I was quite impressed by the diagram about --- I think this also gives a view of empowerment. You go from a dependency to an interdependency. My question is can we focus on interdependence right from the beginning. I am not going from this dependence to interdependency, especially for small business.
MR. HOLT: For small businesses it is much easier, much quicker. For a large company that has a lot of managers from top to bottom, it becomes more difficult, but managers hate to relinquish their responsibilities. We had to go through the painful downsizing to the point first where we had to become efficient and profitable and that meant that we had to reduce cost. When you lose the supervisor, who picks it up? We knew then that we had to pick it up by empowering the people to control these things. We had to move there. There was no way that we could compete in the world, unless we got to that point.
Q: I am Fran Javelin. I am a nurse practitioner with Pacific Gas and Electric Company in San Francisco. My question is regarding employee involvement operations, and you are saying that it comes from the bottom up, in terms of you reversing that chart. Do you give people that time away from jobs to do this because my experience has been we tried to do that, but what happens on the other side we don't see the employees given the time off to do that. Their work piles up on their desk. They often don't have a support staff like management might have. The managers too are getting caught because they have all this other stuff coming down, the changes and downsizing and up-sizing and adding and subtracting. How do you accomplish this?
MR. HOLT: You accomplish it by making the effort and putting some emphasis and feeling the value for the need of this. You will find the way. We did it during shutdowns where overhauls were made in areas. Instead of giving those people added days off and vacation, we went through the training process because you just can't pass on this responsibility without training.
MR. FLEMING: I could probably make a point here. We have had those same problems. They are typically site specific or industry specific. Sometimes we find out that we start out one way and it works great for awhile and then it sort of loses its emphasis or it doesn't work well. So I think recognizing that up front and trying to find creative solutions. We meet during regular work hours. Our employees are allowed time off, and typically there is a little effort. In a team environment typically many of the employees can pitch in and help out for other ones. Some jobs just don't lend themselves to that. So I don't know that there is really a correct answer to that.
The only point, again, that I would make is that be flexible to change your processes if they are not working well for you. One quick example of that, is that we used to -- in a team sewing plant,(there are team modules, if you will) take a person from various teams. We found out that we were disrupting the whole facility. So after about a year of doing that, we went to a single team being the ergonomics committee. So that may be of value.
MR. HOLT: Let me make on extra, additional comment about that. Lack of resources is one of the classic barriers in ergonomics, one of the four that we encounter routinely, and the message is that you have got to be very effective in your problem solving processes. Maybe you don't do as much analysis as the text book might require. In fact, we normally say spend one-third of your time on analysis, two thirds on solutions, and go for the quick, fast, easy to implement solutions.
Q: My name is Brian Sherman. I am with Prince Corporation out of Holland, Michigan, and I very much agree on your thoughts on the interdependent culture.
MR. ALEXANDER: I was hanging some drapes at home. Instead of standing there with my arms overhead, I actually went to the trouble to get a small step stool so that I can bring my hands down. Those kind of stories come up, and that is telling you that you have gotten this culture that we are looking for. It is not too hard to see if you look at it from the other end of the perspective.
We have got time for one more question, and you are it.
Q: Allison Ray for Ford Motor Company. I am actually going to combine the two of you. I do a lot of auditing of all different plants, and I have to compare -- not necessarily have to compare, but the plants by themselves compare their scores with things. One of the things that we started with was very much the same type of approach, evaluating jobs and corrective action, things like that. Where we came up with a lot of problems is do you do it by numeric base? Do you give -- you know, they have got 700 operators in a plant or 3,000. If you have analyzed 50 percent of the jobs, then you get a good or do you accept that you have analyzed four jobs, and you have done a really good job. Do you get a good under evaluating. Under corrective actions, you have evaluated four jobs, you have got really good corrective action. Do you get an excellent or do you have to have 700 jobs evaluated to get a good?
Now, in answering that question -- I would like to know your viewpoint, Mike, how your evaluation is going because I think you are where we were. We are now trying, and we haven't quite got there, to go to the next step of the culture change and measuring the culture change of the system. Of the jobs that they have evaluated, the audit now, we are trying to say, let's go and ask did we correct the problem or also if somebody arrives in medical, what is the process that insures that you do have a evaluation.
A really top step for us is to have the right questions in an audit to measure the system. So I guess my question is: Mike, are you seeing that same evolution that we are, and, Bill, in terms of have you got questions that have gone that way?
MR. FLEMING: I am going to apologize because I just went on break. No, I am just kidding. You asked a lot of questions there, and they were all excellent.
Q: And these are ones that I am really dealing with and having some problems with.
MR. FLEMING: I am not sure we have recognized that internally yet, some of the things that you were speaking to, but what we try to do is address our worst jobs first, of course, like everyone, the priority jobs, and work on those one by one. We learned early on that if you try to do more than one job at a time that you are not going to get anything accomplished. So we definitely have taken the approach, and I think I heard you say that thoroughness is better than trying to run through something.
We have not done any quantified percentage, you know, if you percent 50 percent of your high risk jobs, it is acceptable or it is good or very good or anything like that. Where I have taken our program is the first year we started doing job analysis, which was '92 and into '93, I told the facilities how many jobs they had to do each year. Where I have transitioned the thing to now is that I have said now you know the methodology, you know how to identify your problem jobs, it is your responsibility as jobs bubble up or if new jobs are created. I think the other point that you made that was really good was going back and evaluating have you corrected the job, the problems within that job.
We haven't done a really good job in that, but we do know that we have some jobs that we haven't solve the problems in. We are going back and reanalyzing those. In fact, I have a number of plants doing that right now.
Q: So, you did set some goals in terms of number of jobs to analyze?
MR. FLEMING: Correct, in the beginning, yes, one per quarter.
Q: Now, what if a plant had something like but we spent, you know, six months fixing this one, and we weren't able to attain that. Would there be some leeway?
MR. FLEMING: Yes, I give them some flexibility. Also in that cross area because we have had some difficult years, and some of the interventions were, frankly, pretty costly. So I have given them some leeway, in terms of shifting some of the capital expenditures from one fiscal year into the other. As long as the project is identified, they have a solution identified, they have an action plan to implement that, you know, I am not holding them to having it fully implemented. Fully implemented doesn't mean one work station. It means all 50 if there are 50 work stations.
Q: I think you kind of leaned exactly where we were. Quality is probably more important than the quantity.
MR. FLEMING: That is correct, and when I see a facility not doing a good quality job -- and that is why I review every single job analysis. I reviewed 150 that first year, and that takes a lot of time.
Q: I don't envy you there.
MR. FLEMING: If I don't see a good thorough job analysis, and that is why I am the clearing house, the gate keeper, it goes back. They don't get my signature on it, and I give them specific things that they need to go back and look at.
MR. ALEXANDER: William, have you got a few comments on that?
MR. HOLT: Just briefly, when you first start out the wizard carries the load. So you have got to carry the load and determine how many of these things you want to analyze. We did them all, but we broke down our plant by organization. Really Nomex had a finishing area, a spinning area and a shipping area. We put on the top where do you work, and we know that somebody in the shipping area does about four or five jobs and they are going to name those jobs. So when you go across the whole plant, that is fine. You get a lot of paper, but if you sort them out, and we let those wizards that work in those businesses sort them out for us so that when I get them they are already sorted. So get people involved because you want to cover them all.
Q: Did you do anything, in terms of the culture evaluations? We are getting into some audit questions such as not only do you have a mission statement, but in interviews do you know what the ergonomics committee does in this plant. Things like that is what we are going to try and direct our questions to versus do you have a missions statement. Frankly, all of our plants can whip up a mission statement really quickly.
MR. FLEMING: That is a good question, and I think the lady, the one in front of you also had a point to that too. One of the things that I do sometimes when I go out to sites is I take my badge off because most people won't recognize my face but they will maybe recognize my name. I will walk up to an operator and I will ask them what if we lowered your work surface four inches there or raised it four inches or whatever. If they give me an answer like gee, that wouldn't be very ergonomic, then I know we are there. That is part of that culture that is getting integrated, and it is happening. It really is. Some days it is just by good communication at the plant level by the program coordinator.
MR. ALEXANDER: Let me just add a couple comments to it. In terms of how many jobs should you look at, go right back to queuing from industrial engineering. How many jobs do you have to look at and is that list growing or shrinking. If you have got 1,000 jobs in your plant, you better be looking at 330 of those a year, if you are going to get done in three years. In fact, you probably need to be looking at about 400 the first couple of years because there are going to be some more coming on. If you don't have the resources to do it, maybe you have got the wrong process, but it is really simple math when you start looking at it from that standpoint.
The quality is, obviously, important, and to me quality is I can do super duper quality. On the other hand, I am trying to remember the definition of quality, but it is what the customer requires is the one we want to work at. Have I developed a workable solution? Not have a developed the best solution. Not have I satisfied this whiz bang engineer's idea of what solution is, but have I got the risk factor down to a reasonable level, at least a quality level. If I am not doing that, then my list is going to continue to grow. It is very predictable. I can tell management that. There is no real issue.
In terms of audit systems, it is really a matter of defining what that system is and operationalizing it. In terms of do you have a mission statement, that is nice. I could care less, frankly. What I want to know is if an operator has pain what do they do. Do they report? What does the nurse do? Are there corrective actions? What do the supervisors do? Take some examples and follow those through. It doesn't take long to see that happening.
Okay, well, thank you all for your attention and your time. I appreciate it very much.
