It's 2007: Do you know where your drawings are?

There may be one piece of intellectual capital that packagers value less than their aging workforce (see Packagers undervalue intellectual captial) and that is their equipment documentation. Lack of good documentation is one of the greatest contributors to poor productivity in American manufacturing. All too often, management finds it easier to point fingers at their employees for lack of skills rather than pointing at themselves for lack of a coherent document management policy.

Early in my career, I had the privilege of leading a team of very talented folks to develop a program for managing and maintaining the electrical and electronic systems in food processing and packaging plants. Although I would suggest some updates to this program as the result of the widespread use of mechatronics, many of its principles remain valid. One of the most important findings of this study related to the importance of complete and accurate documentation.

Mechanical systems are somewhat "visually documenting", in other words, you may be able to see what is going on with them. Electronic systems, on the other hand, have their workings hidden from view inside of wires and memory chips. No matter how good of a troubleshooter one is, without accurate documentation, you can only guess about what is really taking place.

The only substitute for good documentation is lots of specific experience. There is often one maintenance guy in a factory that can always fix some particular machine. That's either because he knows where the documentation is hidden or he is carrying it in his head. When this guy retires or quits, the documentation in his head leaves for sure and chances are that the paper copies of the documentation go with him or get thrown away. Management believes that the new maintenance people aren't as smart as the old ones, but it may be that they just don't have access to the same documentation.

Assuming that the plant muddles through maintenance, the next time the machine needs a modification or upgrade, heaven help the people assigned to do it. With luck, the manufacturer may have documents that show how the machine was originally delivered to the plant. This probably isn't how it still is. Incorrect documentation is worse than none at all. More typically, someone will have to spend days or weeks ringing out wires, downloading software and checking out logic. This involves downtime and lots of expense. I just saw a classic example of this situation unfold within the last week.

Every productive manufacturing company needs to have an effective change management and document control process in place that covers things like electrical schematics and software for packaging and manufacturing equipment. If your company does not have such a process, or if you have one but management doesn't support it, then you should have a talk with your manager. Systems needn't be expensive or elaborate, but they must be effectively managed on all operating shifts. I've personally worked with systems where electrical documentation was transferred to a cave on a monthly basis either on electronic media or on microfiche. While this may be over-the-edge for many, it shows how much value some manufacturers place on this aspect of their intellectual capital.

If you've seen examples of what I'm talking about or if you have a good solution in place, my readers and I would like to hear from you.

P.S. -- stop by Bosch Rexroth's PACK EXPO Las Vegas booth # S-5032 from 9am to noon on Tuesday, October 16, and meet me, and pick up a free OnTheEdge T-shirt!

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Comments I agree with you Keith. Documenting changes and information makes a difference and improves productivity. In my experience, documentation of the troubleshooting experiences have made a lot of impact on reducing downtime and increased efficiency. But I think the main challenge here is the format, access and ease in making use of that information. Not all are familiar and flexible with accessing information in digital media and cope up with changes that might occur in information systems. Bill Gates in his book "Business @ the Speed of Thought" says that "Bad news must travel fast". I totally agree with it and I think its an important aspect in transforming your business in this information age. Posted by: Gaurav Kale on September 13, 2007 ""complete and accurate documentation" as you say, Keith, is the key to successful organisational growth. An enterprise will survive without organised documentation, but growth will be slow. In today's environment, even every small enterprise can setup Electronic Document management systems, at almost no additional cost, using the commonly available tools like the "Office" suite -which almost all have access to. This even reduces the cost and manpower required. As the enterprise grows they can install more professional solutions. Posted by: Dadi Bhote on September 14, 2007 Yes I do agree, i am working in a facility now that has no documentation and it is now one of my jobs to create this paper trail and train all other machenanics in upgrading machine documents. I have been doing this now for about a year, and we will see how long this will take to complete 2,3,4... years maybe. Posted by: Dale Bourbeau on September 25, 2007 Post a comment (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) Name: Email Address: URL: Remember personal info? Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)