This is article is part of a series of monthly articles produced by Harbour Results for PMA’s MetalForming Business Edge e-newsletter. Click here to view the full collection of articles.

Reliance on Process, not People, for Safety and Quality

“Access to labor” continues to be the biggest concern for manufacturers, as the second quarter PMA Metalforming Insights study reports – and validated in our conversations with manufacturers. Another finding from the study was the reversal improved safety and quality trend. Perhaps manufacturers running short-handed and simultaneously experiencing increased safety issues and poorer quality is just a coincidence. Or this may be indicative of a breakdown or lack of process.

The last line of defense for maintaining external quality all too often relies on employees trained to look for defects. That last line is weakened when staffed with temporaries, hastily trained entry-level employees, or employees over-extended with long hours or extra responsibilities.

Likewise, safety performance that relies upon experienced employees who “know better” is at risk with rotating temporary staff or new employees who were quickly trained because of shortages or the new expectation that most won’t stick around anyway, so why bother? Previous studies by Harbour Results and PMA Metalforming Insights have already shown a correlation between increased and sustained over time with an increase in incident rates.

The “access to labor” problem has persisted for over a year. And while unemployment numbers may change soon, manufacturing no longer has a wage gap benefit over other employment options to suggest the problem will go away if or when unemployment increases. Therefore, manufacturers must shift to systems and processes to sustain and improve performance in safety and quality without relying on tenured experienced people.

Best-in-Class Safety

The best-in-class safety performance is driven by more than awareness training. A strong onboarding process including safety training should never be cut short in haste to get people into value-producing positions, but that is only the beginning. Best-in-class EH&S systems are not “find & fix” systems that focus on reacting to incidents with corrective actions. Best-in-class EH&S systems work to “learn & prevent” by being proactive in doing their best to eliminate hazards before injuries can occur. They conduct risk assessments in seeking to understand what could happen, however improbable. For those serious “black swan” events, they problem-solve and implement preventative measures. They also engage the workforce to identify concerns and audit the work environment for compliance with safety policies. From the top management down, they reinforce the importance of keeping yourself and your coworkers safe.

Best-in-Class Quality

Best-in-class quality performance is not driven by thorough inspections, even if it’s automated 100% at end of line instead of manual. While those companies may enjoy a very low external PPM failure rate, they invest a lot to shift to a higher internal PPM failure rate. Best-in-class quality performance is achieved by those companies that have shifted their cost of quality spending away from external and internal failures, and even away from inspection. They spend their cost of quality on prevention through diligent pursuit of process control. Inspection is not intended to be a safety net to catch bad quality. Inspection is intended as a tool to generate better data to understand process variation, its frequencies, and ultimately, its sources to institute controls to keep production within the range of allowable tolerances. 

I can hear the counterarguments already: “You just don’t understand stamping. There are too many variables, and our customers keep tightening the tolerance ranges.” But I do. I understand that flat-rolled metals’ properties are anisotropic and can be within a wide range allowed by the material specification. Process variables can include lubrication application, temperatures – even humidity, variations stroke-to-stroke of the press, and, of course, the condition of the die over time. Yet among you are stampers than can deliver to exacting tolerances at consistently good quality because they seek to understand and control the process variables that introduce variation into the manufactured product.

“Access to labor” will likely be a consistent problem for the industry. Therefore, the industry needs to adapt by ensuring onboarding training is complete and effective, regardless of turnover experiences. And most importantly, the processes for delivering quality in a safe environment must evolve from “find & fix” to “learn & prevent” to drive consistently improving performance despite the risk of an inexperienced and short-handed workforce.

Jason C. Brewer, a Director at Harbour Results, helps clients implement onboarding training programs and evolve business processes to employ PDCA that drives continuous improvement.  He has extensive experience consulting and working within metals manufacturing companies in roles from engineering to executive management.