When you overburden the shop with documentation, most likely you’ve got your priorities wrong. You are using a paper trail to protect engineering and administrative jobs; challenging the shop to do wrong. A factory floor is often peopled by functional illiterates. Those few who can interpret detailed drawings and instructions are normally too busy resolving crises. Simply put:

If you can’t describe what you want produced on one page, then you are part of the problem, not the solution!

Many years ago, B.C. (before computers), I was given the assignment of developing a manufacturing control system for a woodworking job shop that was growing rapidly. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I visited a number of successful cabinet and furniture manufacturers to learn how they communicated with the factory floor. I was amazed by the similarities among "winning" paperwork systems:

• All the job information was on a one page "traveler" - job#, quantity, sizes, and instructions, (process, time required, and destination), including the drawing.

• Employees signed off the work they did, (labor and material used), on separate daily time sheets. They were encouraged to correct mistakes and note improvements directly on the traveler. Time sheets were tabulated daily against the estimate for an early warning about inventory fluctuations and cost overruns.

• All travelers were returned to the office for engineering review at the end of the job. Absolutely no drawings and instructions remained on the floor to create confusion on future runs.

• Free form text was avoided. The instructions were always in the same format and fields. This made it possible for employees with limited literacy to find the key word for their operation and read the proper fields for sizes and tooling.

• Production control was simplistic. Jobs were sorted by due dates and, at many companies, coded by colored ribbon or printed on colored paper. The operator was told: "Complete the blue jobs first before starting on the yellows". (Hey, these were the good old days when customers would wait months for a cutting.)

Along came the computer with its amazing ability to sort lists of data. Process information could be sorted by due date, work center, etc. and inventory could be tracked faster than the old manual Kardex systems. "Material Requirement Planning" metamorphosed into "Manufacturing Requirement Planning, Two" but never became a butterfly because the emphasis was on information to control the factory, rather than to help run the factory. Today we want to empower the people that run the factory; the information is for them, not some abstract planner. The only way to produce efficiently with a short lead time is to have production planning and inventory control as part of the factory manger’s team. Computer generated schedules and cutting lists that can be updated instantly to work around bottlenecks are a great improvement over visually scheduling by color. However, process information, particularly for assemblies, often gets lost in the shuffle.

The early days of MRP created another bureaucracy that helped delay delivery and added confusion on the factory floor. These were the data-base builders who labored to create unique part identifications and bills of material for each and every variant of the product. Today we can bypass them for most applications by using artificial intelligence built into the program that automatically (and instantly) creates the bill of material as needed, discarding it after the order is completed to avoid creating tons of unneeded paperwork and filling up disk space.

By not sending each product variant to engineering, and transferring production coordination to the factory level, you can shrink response time to customer orders from weeks to days. This also drastically reduces work-in-process inventories, system reports, and the number of analysts needed to manage this material.

Another important benefit of a dynamically created bill of material is that it can simultaneously create a part or product drawing and print it along with the process information. The latest development is "virtual reality" for assembly drawings which checks the fit between parts as it assembles them. These are not paper drawings, they are on factory floor monitors where the viewpoint can be changed and the "virtual" product image partially disassembled to obtain more information.

Accompanying this article is a SIM*plicity assembly order. Look at it for "concepts only" as every company’s needs are different. (You may not need color, but may want bar coding, more assembly details, etc.) The basics though are all there; product and order identification, due date, global options (for all items on the customer order), the total requirements in materials (including locator ticket numbers and labor time (setup and run). The picture is not a generic sketch - it has all the options and features that the customer ordered and is also used on the shipping label.