Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/856948
W EEKLY EDITION AUG 2, 2017 Fail Is a Four - Letter Word … But Should It Be? ...continued Adapted from an article by Lia DiBello, President and CEO of Workplace Technologies Research Inc. Harnessing failure in order to win. I will end with a story about a Midwest foundry that we worked with many years ago. After having gone bankrupt and repossessed by a bank to which they owed millions, the workers began to regroup after the owner suddenly died. Through a series of exercises designed by our company, they pull out of their trouble and recovered, becoming a foundry of choice for special industrial castings that required a lot of skill and which could be sold for a premium price. After two years we visited them to see how they were doing. Remarkably they had found a way to reduce the scrap rate of multi - ton castings far below what was thought possible given the physics of large molds. We asked them ho w they did it, especially since at one time their scrap rate was far above the industry standard. They said they had been so wrong about the best market for their products, they must be wrong about many things. They started to look for problems and ways to find out their causes. They started with the minimum possible scrap rate, (which meant the whole industry might also be wrong). They decided to treat the scrap problem as the "scrap puzzle" and endeavored to solve it. They took detailed digital pictures of every scrapped casting and attached them to the bills of material in their ERP system. This allowed the data to be analyzed continuously for patterns. It turned out that certain products had high scrap rates, skewing the averages. When these parts were taken out of the data, the scrap rate approached zero. Further analysis showed that the problems were very often the same kind. Changes in the casting process for those part numbers brought down the scrap rate overall. The point here is that harnessing th e natural trial and error process led to extraordinary understanding of a complex event and much better performance. Their next puzzle was the minimum time to produce a large specialty casting. Once assumed to require six weeks, they were producing them in two weeks the last time we checked in. Being the only foundry of its kind to survive the 2008 market crisis, they had the problem of increased demand and had to find a way to shorten production times. So what does this mean for your portable sanitatio n business? Basically, the research shows that if you focus on never making mistakes, the ones you can't avoid will hurt you more than the time and cost involved in plannful "trial and error," especially if that is part of your company culture. People do b etter at work when they aren't walking on eggshells, and a company that assumes they won't always get it right will be more willing to fix problems and course correct. This saves time and money. So it makes sense to look at how you do things. If folks on your team are comfortable trying, are not afraid of failing, and everyone is willing to make adjustments along the way, pat yourself on the back. If not, take the time to look at how you can improve your company by making it okay to fail. P AGE 11