Kick-starting Your SPC Program – The Production Team's Role

It is important to make your program a success by ensuring your team is educated about SPC concepts.  Another element to success is creating a culture of confidence and patience as the transition occurs within your organization. The next phase is identifying the production team’s role in implementing and making your SPC program successful long-term.

The Production Team’s Role.  

Your “eyes on the street”

The production team is vital to the success of the program, because they have the best view of the process. Only shop floor production workers know from personal experience the current practices and problems on the floor. Chances are they have a good sense of their equipment’s capabilities including how to tweak it to make it do what they want.

As improvements are adopted, the production team will also know they are further maximizing their time.  In actual case studies, we have found estimates that clients using the Synergy Suite are saving approximately 30% of an operator’s day due to data entry. Synergy virtually eliminates data entry errors giving your team the time to focus on other value-added activities that include refining processes that are in front of them daily.

Empowerment and “buy-in”

Production teams can be empowered to take, or at least suggest, corrective actions. Their involvement in problem solving should be acknowledged and considered to ensure buy-in. Without the team’s input, process improvements are likely to be short lived. If the production team is not invested, have not helped co-create solutions, or they don’t agree with the proposed solution, they may simply “forget” to do it the new way.  If they’ve helped come up with a solution, typically they’ll feel empowered and help it succeed.

How can Zontec SPC help you with involving your production team? Register for a software trial here.

This content is from Zontec’s The Book of Statistical Process Control.
You can download a free copy here.