Track: Industry Solutions

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges facing small and medium manufacturers in today’s economic environment is the recruitment and retention of talent across all functions in an organization. It is extremely challenging to find and keep shop floor associates as welders, painters, machinists, and assemblers. Even if an organization can hire skilled personnel, training them on specialized equipment and work practices takes a lot of effort and time. Work instructions (WI) or standard operating procedures (SOP) are a set of instructions that enumerate all the steps and activities required to complete a job. Traditional WI or SOP suffer from many disadvantages: they are hard to control, difficult to understand in many situations, time consuming to create and maintain, and do not capture the tacit knowledge of trained employees effectively. To overcome the challenges posed by regular SOP, a new way of creating them has gained traction in the last few years called Video Work Instructions (VWI). In this approach, a video of the manufacturing process is taken while the operation is being carried out. The video is later edited to include the work instruction in the frames during the actual operation. In this project, VWI was created for a medium manufacturer in Southern MN for welding and assembly processes. The VWI was later used in employee training and cross training. It was found that there was a reduction of the new employee training period by approximately 50% and a productivity increase by approximately 12%. This paper will talk about the advantages and challenges associated with such an approach.