Faulty Memory

Spend some time at ProMat at the smaller booths, taking notes as you go.

By Jim Apple -- Modern Materials Handling, 1/1/2007

It's show time! ProMat 2007 is here. Whenever I visit the show, I am embarrassed to be reminded about how many things I have forgotten.

Making my rounds at the show, I always see something that I have never seen before that has the possibility of being incorporated into the concept design of a current project. But what really troubles me is that, without exception, as I walk through the show I see equipment and concepts that I have seen before – and forgotten! Many of these also have potential within current projects.

Most often, these products are tucked away in the smallest booths. They are never very flashy, but always eminently practical. Usually, they are narrowly focused solutions to make a workplace more efficient, to make the tasks easier for the operator and to help improve quality.

They might be simple tools for positioning product for the operator, visual systems support to make instructions clearer or a new type of cart that is easier to move around the warehouse.

Search engines are great for finding those things that we can remember, but they don't help much with the things that we've forgotten. For that, we need a chance to be re-exposed.

I encourage you to spend some extra time poking around in the small booths. Be sure to carry a good supply of 3x5 cards for notes to help you remember the great ideas for applications that come to mind. If you don't make it to the show this year, other good reminders are in the last pages of this magazine, with all of the business card size ads.

But, equipment alternatives at the show are not the only things that I forget. As we begin to size-up a problem, it is easy to get completely consumed with detailed spreadsheet data analysis. I forget that there are other good analysis tools to help understand the nature of a problem.

While sorting through a box of old books in the attic I stumbled across my college text on Plant Layout and Materials Handling, first written by my father in 1950. I found a number of straight forward techniques to visualize both the magnitude of a materials handling problem and the opportunity for improvement. You might try some of these:

This simple chart tabulates each step as a product moves through a process. It indicates moves, operations, delays or buffers, storage and inspections. The travel distances and operation times are also captured. When we are honest, and count even the small moves, it is not uncommon to find 12 to 15 moves just to get a product through a warehouse.

The flow chart superimposes the process chart on a layout of the facility and makes it very easy to see unnecessary moves and backtracking.

Placing process charts for a machine and its operator side-by-side, one can easily see when one is waiting for the other to finish a task, resulting in either lost capacity or lost labor.

For analyzing real detail at the workplace, this chart demonstrates the opportunity for shortening task times when both hands are used simultaneously, preferably in symmetrical motions.

Finding these "good old tools" in one text makes me want to go back through the rest of the box. Computerized analysis may help us answer a question faster than we could before, but it takes the old tools to find the right question to ask.

We're all smarter than we think – when we remember what we know!