With Our "New Normal," You May Need to Update How You Audit Your Plant's Operation
Taking the time to conduct ongoing audits of what's happening on your plant floor can be key to ensuring safety, quality and efficiency. Eric Stoop, CEO of EASE, takes a look at how manufacturers need to adapt their plant floor audits to the new normal in 2021, including what to focus on, how to make audits safer, and what it takes to make the most of the coming opportunities.
Beyond any doubt, the plant floor is a different environment to what it was a year ago -- or indeed, ever has been. Social distancing measures have meant production lines have had to be reorganized, and shift patterns heavily restructured. Remote working is here to stay but has brought with it many challenges and impacts on processes. Workers have been sidelined and people have had to adopt new roles, all while companies have had to respond to the pandemic by implementing new sanitation, screening and mask practices.
VIDEO: Plant Floor Audits
But good news is on the horizon: the pent-up demand economists are forecasting could mean big growth for manufacturing, with one caveat:
Taking advantage of this opportunity requires an ability to meet quality, safety and production goals while implementing new plant floor protocols.
Safety First During the Age of COVID
With COVID-19 vaccines now widespread, the end is in sight. But experts warn that complacency could lead to spiking cases, and manufacturers must remain vigilant to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in their plants.
Eric Stoop, CEO of EASE
To make COVID-19 safety a daily practice among the workforce, plant floor audits should incorporate COVID-19 safety questions, focusing on items such as:
- Whether workers are maintaining appropriate distancing
- Personal protective equipment (PPE) and correct mask usage
- Verifying sanitation frequency of equipment and shared spaces
- Awareness around COVID-19 safety protocols
Companies that have incorporated COVID-19 questions into audits report that it helps demonstrate that leadership takes employee safety seriously and provides a feedback loop to encourage compliance.
How to Ensure Plant Floor Audits and Inspections are Safer
Plant floor audits and safety inspections themselves must be adapted to the new normal in order to keep workers safe and prevent virus transmission.
What should audits and inspections look like, when accounting for today's safety challenges?
For starters, it's important to make sure that auditors wear sufficient PPE and stay six feet or more away from the workers they audit if possible. Contactless audits are also a possibility.
It's also critical to sanitize any shared auditing equipment, such as a company-issued tablet. For companies doing mobile audits, it may make sense to have employees complete audits on their personal smartphones. For paper-based audits, you'll want a plastic clipboard that can be sanitized and a fresh pen or pencil provided for each audit (or have auditors bring one).
Preparing for Pent-Up Demand
IHS Markit predicts strong growth in 2021 as consumers feel more and more confident about returning to normal life.
The result: after a year of uncertainty and tough economic times, manufacturers may be poised for a big comeback.
The possibility is a double-edged sword, creating opportunity for companies to recoup some of their losses from 2020 while also creating risks. It's especially true when it comes to introducing new products, which may require added resources even as companies struggle with COVID-related staffing shortages.
Plant floor audits can help bridge the gap, giving manufacturers additional eyes on their processes to both improve yield, quality and efficiency. Verification is also crucial in light of plant floor processes that may have been reconfigured to reduce viral transmission, or employees who may be assigned to new roles or locations. Within this context, manufacturers are using auditing platforms to generate real-time data from the plant floor, revealing insights that would otherwise not be available without digitized audits.
Solving the Production vs. Quality Problem
In the manufacturing world, quality is often framed as a process that stands in the way of meeting production targets. However, the new normal requires a reframing of quality as precisely the key for hitting those targets.
Take, for example, companies that have used layered process audits (LPAs) as a strategy for improving both quality and production levels. LPAs focus on conducting fast, frequent checks of manufacturing process inputs, allowing manufacturers to catch problems before they result in a large number of defects.
Automated LPAs have helped manufacturers proactively address systemic issues that could have led to quality escapes, improving process throughput overall. LPAs save time and help solve the production vs. quality conundrum by:
- Minimizing resources used to fix problems after they have become widespread
- Identifying equipment issues before downtime occurs
- Ensuring more resources are spent on products that can actually be sold (as opposed to becoming internal scrap or customer returns)
- Verifying critical-to-quality items to avoid problems with new products or workers new to a production line
- Helping ensure consistency amid changes such as fewer operators on each line and remote training protocols
All of these are critical to maintaining productivity given that many plants are already running extra shifts due to having to spread workers out on production lines.
As manufacturers continue to navigate this year's challenges, plant floor audits will take on more importance than ever before in adapting to new safety protocols and combatting staff shortages. Automation has a vital role to play in making audits more efficient, allowing companies to make the most of the opportunities this year presents without risking the health of their employees or the satisfaction of their customers.
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