How Industry 4.0 Improves Manufacturing Employee Productivity: Part 3 of 3

When we think of employee training, we normally think of teaching an employee how to operate equipment. While this is valuable, there are other types of training that most companies rarely consider yet are fundamental for the operator to be able to improve their overall efficiency.

Determine Your Objectives

To achieve your objectives, your training program must be carefully designed. So, before you begin, ask yourself: what do you want to accomplish? What are your training goals? A good example of how a training program can help your organization is with its corporate culture. Companies are legal entities that have values and a culture. The culture and values are the collective behavior of all your employees, and how they work and interact with each other. If you are not proactive in developing an ideal company culture, one will develop on its own. Normally, when this happens, the results are not attitudes that are healthy or appropriate. Therefore, your training program is an excellent conduit for you to begin to model the type of culture you want in your organization.

A company’s culture is made up of different dimensions that define its values and behaviors. This topic can be broad, so in this post we will only focus on the aspects related to driving results. In a production environment, this is one of the key dimensions we want to develop in our employees and is probably the most useful. Your training program should always be geared to improving overall employee performance.

Recommended Training Courses

For the training program to be successful, we need to build a foundation on various topics and methods to establish a common language within the organization. Take for example the topic of quality. In most organizations, employees start as new hires. These new employees have different backgrounds; some come from different industries and work experiences; A few may have some type of training in quality control methods, some in Six Sigma, others in ISO 9001 and so forth. Others may not have any quality training at all. If your company does not adopt a common quality standard and train all employees in it, implementing quality improvement will be difficult. It will be as if the company lacked a common language everyone understands or with which they can communicate.

To avoid this “Tower of Babel” syndrome where everyone speaks a different quality language based on their previous experiences, your training program should include mandatory quality training for all employees. The subject of quality has very advanced concepts that are not suitable for every employee. It is highly recommended that the training be divided into different levels. Your Industry 4.0 

1.- White Belt Quality: This training level is designed to provide a general overview of the techniques and tools used for quality management and performance improvements. All employees, regardless of rank or title, should take this training. The main goals of the training are:

• Create a “common language” throughout the organization regarding quality concepts and performance tools to facilitate communication and understanding when addressing quality practices.
• Provide high-level understanding of quality techniques to enable the employees to identify quality and performance improvement opportunities within their work units.
• Provide sufficient knowledge to enable all employees to actively participate and contribute to the company’s quality improvement projects.
• Ensure every employee is capable of understanding KPI and Metric results, especially the ones used to establish goals and objectives within your organization.

2.- Yellow Belt Process Improvement: This training provides sufficient understanding of quality techniques, tools, and concepts to ensure participating employees can carry out tasks associated with quality improvements in their respective work areas. This training is intended for supervisors and professionals. The main objective of this course is to provide more advanced training of various quality tools and techniques that can be used to design continuous process improvement, increase efficiency, and lower production cost.

3.- Green Belt Project Management: Whether it is building a new facility, installing new equipment, designing new product lines or software implementation, the success of any of these endeavors will largely depend on having the internal skills to effectively manage new projects. Unfortunately, most small, and medium-sized companies never adopt a Project Management methodology. As a result, many of their initiatives do not yield the optimum return on investment and end up exceeding their budgets and implementation timeframe. They may also engage in projects without assessing their true Readiness Level to implement them. This can lead to catastrophic results in which a project can “suck the life” out of an organization. When this happens, the major consequences are not just cost overruns but opportunities lost due to senior management’s lack of engaging in other initiatives critical to the organization.

There are multiple project management standards such as OPM by Project Management Institute, IEEE, and Project Charter via Six Sigma.  Choosing which method to adopt can be an undertaking of its own. The best approach is to create a standard that fits the needs of your organization. For example, at MetricSoft we combined the best practices from each of these standards and created a truncated project management system designed for rapid project implementation geared for manufacturing companies.

Project Management training should be mandatory for all professionals in your organization. The course must include training on Risk Management, Change Control, and Goals settings. Implementing these simple methods like Change Management can help avoid costly quality mistakes.

In this blog, we will limit our discussion to White Belt Training. If you are interested, we can assist you in developing all three courses and tailor them to your needs.

What should you include in your White Belt Training?

The White Belt training will be given to all employees with the goal of creating an organization that is focused on achieving results. Results is a measurable dimension. Before you create your training material, you should have a set of goals for the organization cascaded down to each department and process. In the future, we will create a blog for Goals Settings, but for now, the following are a few training recommendations to consider when creating your White Belt Training:

1. Quality KPI: Always include quality in your goals. Keep in mind quality consists of 1) adherence to product specifications, 2) lowering production costs and 3) ensuring timely delivery of final goods. These three KPIs should be part of every process goal.

2. Metrics: Include metrics to help monitor and improve overall efficiency. For example, use metrics like Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time Between Jobs (MTBJ), Takt Time, and Operator Availability. These are metrics that will help you improve efficiency by monitoring the causes of idle equipment time.

3. KPI vs Metrics: Training should include the definition of and differences between a KPI and a Metric. Do not assume all of your employees will know the difference between them or know what they are. At the end of the day, all of your goals will be based and measured on either KPI or Metrics. Understanding how to interpret them will help your employees monitor production status.
    
4. Process Control Plans: To track and monitor your goals, you will have to depend on the execution of Process Control Plans. Provide some training on what Process Controls are, why they are needed, who executes them and what they consist of. Almost all production results will come from the execution of these, as well as from the performance of your operators. It is critical that they understand what they are and, if possible, they should have some input in their design to increase their confidence in them.

5. Quality Measure: This is one KPI that many organizations do not measure, and even if they do, the results are not immediately available. Also, your operators will have little to no time to correct the issue before it moves to the next process, or worse, ends up with your customer. Make sure you adopt a KPI to measure overall product quality and train your operators on how to read the KPI. For example, if you use Six Sigma, you do not have to train them on the complexity of the calculation. This should be done by your Industry 4.0 solution in the backend, but they should still know the difference between levels of Six Sigma; for example, 3 versus 5.5 sigma.

6. RAG: Explain the purpose of RAG (Red, Amber, Green) which is used to display KPI and Metric results. When creating dashboards and reports, use RAG to display KPI results. If trained properly, your operator will know when a KPI or Metric is trending in the wrong direction and should take immediate action to correct the issue. Also, when creating your KPI and Metrics, include and train your employees on their Upper/Lower Specification Limits and the internal Upper/Lower Control limits.
7. Types of Inspection Plans: Training should also include descriptions of the different types of Inspection Plans that will be used in your organization. To name a few: Quality Assurance, Receiving Inspections, Product Quality Control, Process Control Charts. The results of these will be used to assess their performance. The better they understand their purpose, the greater their acceptance and contribution.
8. Incident Prevention: In the end, you want to create a proactive organization focused on incident prevention. Reactive organizations are always chasing solutions to problems that repeat themselves. Train your employees to use the tools available to them in the Industry 4.0 solution to prevent production incidents. They should have access to real-time dashboards, inspection plans, process controls, etc., which are all designed to eliminate production variables.
9. Team Collaboration: Schedule your training sessions in a manner that encourages a mix of employees from different processes to attend. If your company has a SIPOC diagram, consult it to select the employees for each training session. Employees from one process should understand how their output affects their internal customers. During training, promote active participation from the employees: you’ll be surprised at the level of know-how your operators have of their own processes. The training should include SIPOC (Supplier, Process, Output, Customer), and the employees should provide a list of issues originating from their internal suppliers. This discussion should avoid finger pointing; the trainer must stress that the purpose is to root out issues that can ultimately affect overall quality and efficiency, which will benefit all constituents.

In our first blog, we provided a sample of an Employee Performance Dashboard with a graph that rates the overall productivity and efficiency of all employees in each process. If your organization chooses to display this type of graph, explain that its purpose is not to show winners and losers. Remind them that the payout of the Incentive Program is based on the weighted average of the results of all the employees, and that the purpose of the graph is to show which colleagues need help in improving their stats. You will want to use this information to promote collaboration, so that your operators can help one another, share best practices, and avoid the occurrence of one employee jeopardizing overall results. When it comes to production, information must be transparent, fluent, reliable, and accessible to those directly responsible for production performance.

Post-Training Testing

Each class or course in your training program must include some form of quiz or test. Our experience has shown that employees are more attentive and engaged when they know there will be a pass/fail test at the end of the training. However, the goal of your test is to make sure they pay attention and absorb the training material. When creating the test questions, use multiple choice and avoid written answers which can be difficult to grade. Include questions for the most relevant topics, and limit the number of questions to 10-15 total. Some individuals do not perform well in tests, and can be intimidated by them. You will want to create a relaxed and enjoyable environment: explain to them the purpose of the test is not to fail anyone, but to help them learn the material. Let them know you want everyone to pass with a high mark and for this reason they will be allowed to consult their notes during the test. Encourage them to take notes; some of us absorb more material through the process of writing.

Lastly, your Industry 4.0 solution should have a module for you to administer the test with instant grading capabilities. For example, MetricSoft uses tablets so employees can read the training manual and take the test online. For each employee, it records the training session, test taken, date and time of test, duration, and test score. This information is useful for evaluating your training program’s effectiveness.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Your Training Program and Trainers

Any initiative that requires investment in time, money and/or materials, must yield a benefit. The same applies to your training program, hence you must have the means to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and that of the trainer(s). The White Belt training provides the foundation to improve KPI and Metrics in other training materials. For example, most equipment training manuals simply provide instructions on how to operate them. They do not include “best practices” to improve metrics related to quality output, or OEE.

Many business owners and executives attend trade shows where they see the latest and greatest versions of new equipment. They are impressed by the high level of productivity and throughput at the show. Then they buy the equipment, only to soon realize they have obtained only a fraction of the efficiency demonstrated. They did not realize that the individuals operating the equipment at the trade show were engineers or high caliber technicians. Yet they expect their employees to yield the same level of performance as the manufacturer’s technicians at the show. This does not mean the equipment is not capable of yielding similar throughput; It simply means your training program must include operating efficiencies.

If you incorporate White Label training, you should review all your process and equipment training manuals and incorporate best practices to improve KPI and metrics. Your training evaluation program must measure the performance of each employee before and after training. If the training material is well thought-out and the trainer does a good job delivering the material, then you should notice a bump in performance from the employees who partook in the training. If no noticeable improvement is detected, then you must re-evaluate the training material and/or the trainer. Your Industry 4.0 solution must include in its Employee Performance Dashboard pre- and post-training efficiency results of each operator. Improvement in employee performance is the best indicator of your training program’s effectivenes