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by:
Daniel Wilkinson -
Director, Talsico International
As a manufacturing professional you strive to achieve quality and consistency in your manufacturing
processes. To accomplish this you work with your supply chain to ensure the price, quality and delivery of raw materials meets your requirements; you work
with OEMs and engineering personnel to ensure that your equipment and processes are under control; and you work with support staff, operators and
maintenance personnel to build quality, consistency and productivity into every aspect of your operation.
So why isn’t your plant running like a Swiss watch?
Good question: while the issues facing each plant are different, one common issue across many of the plants we’ve worked with is that their plant
documentation — their procedures — are very nearly ‘useless’. Before you take offense or call me an alarmist, let me explain that statement.
A well researched, well written, well formatted and well implemented procedure is one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve both individual
and organizational performance. But how many companies do all of those things well? The sad answer is very few! And the harsh
truth is that any one of them done poorly (poor research, poor writing, poor formatting or poor implementation) — will result in a ‘useless’ procedure,
e.g. a procedure that nobody uses.
In this article we are going to provide you with just a few of the strategies Talsico use to create and implement procedures that really work: procedures
that have proven effective in improving individual and organizational performance.  How are procedures ‘used’?
Procedures are used for four primary purposes:
1. Procedures help people ‘learn’ how to perform a defined task, a certain way,
to a certain standard.
2. Procedures set performance standards. You have the ‘right’ to expect the performance you specify, no more, no less. It is
important to remember that when you write a procedure you are setting a performance standard!
3. Procedures serve as a quality or audit tool. In other words, I should be able to read a procedure, watch you do the task and
assess if you are doing it correctly.
4. Lastly, procedures — if correctly structured — should function as job aids. They should help me perform my job to the desired
standard.
Procedures can be used for other purposes, but these are what we refer to as the ‘primary’ purposes — and
how well they serve these purposes is critical to determining their usefulness. How well ‘used’ are your Plant’s procedures?
Would you invest several hundred thousand dollars in assets that no one uses? No! But that is exactly what we see many companies doing with regard to
their procedures. They are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars (in time and fees) writing and updating procedures that very few
people, if any, read.
This led us to an obvious question: why are so many procedures under-utilized? Here is what we found. The two major deterrents to the use of procedures
are the length of the document and poor access to the document.
Excessive Length – is the major deterrent to the effective
use of your procedures. Once a document goes over four pages in length you begin to experience declines in both ‘access rate’ and ‘reading effectiveness’,
both of which have an enormous impact of the usefulness of your procedure.
The access rate – or reading repetition, is one of the factors that leads to improved learning. If you read a complex or technical document once,
you will come away with "X" level of understanding. What happens if you read that document two or three times? Do you gain a better understand? Do you
retain the information longer? Yes, of course you do. So one way of improving the performance of your procedures is to improve the access rate, in other
words — increase the number of times an employee might read the document over a six month or one year period.
Reading effectiveness – measures the absorption of information, or X level of understanding from the paragraph above. Absorption is determined by a
number of criteria, some of which are within our control, such as how we format our information, and some of which are outside our control, such as reader
literacy. The important point to understand is all documents are not equal: even with exactly the same information how you present your information,
how it is formatted, the length of the document, the use of colors, symbols and flowcharts — all of these things have an enormous impact on reading
effectiveness.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Observe a few people from your plant as they read an eight to ten page document. Do they read it sequentially
as the author intended? Or do they flip around the document, reading a bit here and a bit there?
Most people skim and skip through lengthy documents. The unfortunate result of this ‘style’ of reading is that it reduces reading effectiveness. The
reader picks up a bit of information here, but misses an important point in the next paragraph, or they get certain information, but take it out of
context. Worst of all, the reader will believe they’ve read it. They will look you straight in the eye and say “Yes, I read your changeover procedure” and
still get it wrong! Because the way they read it reduced their reading effectiveness.
In documents of eight to ten pages in length these factors have dramatic impacts: to the extent that your procedures may no longer be considered useful.
Many people writing procedures find themselves in a ‘catch-22’ when it comes to the length of the document. On one hand they feel the need to be thorough
and include all of the information the reader will require to execute the task; but for lack of an effective format they end up creating a lengthy
procedure that few people will read and understand.
Poor Access – is another powerful deterrent to the use of
your procedures. Poor access is a controversial topic as everybody seems to have a different idea of what constitutes ‘good access’. Imagine the following
scenario:
You are performing a changeover that you haven’t done for several months. As part of this changeover you need to dial in a setting, but it has been so
long since you’ve done it that you can’t remember if the setting is three or four. Now, you have three choices, you can:
-
1. Stop what you are doing, walk ten
paces to retrieve the binder of procedures, look up the correct procedure, get the correct setting and go back to the changeover.
or
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2. You could stop what you are doing and
walk ten paces to the networked PC, open the document management program, locate the correct procedure, open the document, get the correct setting and go
back to the changeover.
or
What do you think the majority of your people would do in the same situation? If you answered option three
don’t feel bad, so have nearly everyone we’ve asked.
The key point to take from this discussion is that any access that requires a person to stop the performance of their task and move more than two or three
steps from where the information is needed, is going against human nature and is unlikely to succeed. It doesn’t matter if your procedures are printed or
online, good access is defined quite simply: extend your arm out from your body, the information you need to perform that changeover should be no further
than your fingertips. That is good access!
So, how do you solve these problems?
At Talsico we solve these problems by providing our clients with the software and training they need to create truly useful procedures: procedures that
are well-researched, well-written, well-formatted and well-implemented..
Our Process Picture Map™ software enables them to take lengthy documents of ten to twelve pages and reduce them to one double-side page!.
The result is a highly visual, highly informative document that gets a lot of use.
We also run internet and classroom training programs to teach companies the same strategies and tools we use in our consulting practice. We teach
investigative interviewing processes that are designed to capture outstanding practice; we teach strategies for reducing the length of a document, how to
use symbols, flowcharts, colors and photos to improve reading effectiveness; and perhaps most importantly, we teach companies how to properly implement
their procedures. You can have the best procedure in the world; if it isn’t well implemented then you, your employees and your plant won’t receive any
benefit.
We invite you to try our software and our internet training FREE for 15 days.
If you find, as hundreds of other companies have, that our software and training helps you improve individual and organizational performance, then we
would love to have you as a client.
If you decide for any reason that our software or training do not suit you, then simply return our software at the end of the 15 days and you’ll have
received our outstanding internet training program at no cost with no further obligation. It’s as easy as that.
Simply click on this link www.talsico.com and we’ll
have you creating ‘useful’ procedures that
truly improve individual and organizational performance.
©
Talsico International 2004. All rights reserved
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download a printable PDF version of this article.
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