What Could Be Going Wrong – Part 2

In my last message I mentioned a valuable lesson that I would explain in this message.

We were having trouble with matching the color on a 990C laminate order. It called for an olive green tint. We’d mixed several batches of resin and all were a different tint of olive green.

My brother (Phil) and I were told to go watch the resin mixing to see if we could determine what was going on. We were standing in the resin room watching and looking for… we didn’t know what. I’d never mixed resin so I didn’t know what I was looking for. As I was watching the process and thinking about it, an idea popped into my head – since I didn’t know what I was looking for, maybe I should look for what could be going wrong. It changed the way I looked at things.

Many times in the years since, I’ve been walking through the facility observing the various operations and asking myself, “What could be going wrong here?”. Once in a while I’ll see things that would have produced scrap had I not been there. It’s a different attitude, has reduced scrap and changed the way I evaluate things when I walk through the plant.