Sweet and Simple

Our company picks two people out of every department to be auditors for a month. Every week they spend 15-30 minutes in a department other than theirs to audit on cleanliness, personal belongings, tool placement, trash cans, cleaning supplies, hazards and many other criteria. Each item checked is rated from 1-5 with 1 being the worse and than added together for a total with a higher number being good. When the audit is finished they than return the completed audit sheets to the manager of that department where they can determine what areas of concern need to be addressed before the next weeks audits. This has really improved the safety and cleanliness of our factory floor not to mention the ease of finding tools that are in their correct place.

Although at home my place is usually an unorganized mess at work I am typically well organized and keep things properly placed.

However my experience with creating a well organized and correctly labeled work place means that it makes everything super easy for the rest of the work force to pillage, plunder, and permanently borrow everything they can easily find to the highest levels of annoyance for me when ever I am not around to bust a sticky finger or two.

That problem tends to transfer the time wasted searching in a messy work area for a specific item over to searching everyone else's work areas for my "borrowed" items instead meaning my total lost time spent searching is basically the same in the end.

I'm sure that a plethora of labels, such as "band saw over there," "lathe three paces left," "drill press thataway," "this here is a milling machine," and "shop vac at large--look around" will do wonders to improve productivity. Whee!!

I agree that there is a such thing as over labeling such as labeling all your machines. We only mark and label areas for pallet jacks, two wheelers, parts holding areas, walkways and stuff like that. On top of marking floor areas we have tool boxes and peg board marked for different tools to ease and speed up locating tools and this is where it does help speed up production. If a tool area is labeled and the tools get put back where they go it makes checking parts and setting up machines go a lot more efficient when you don't have to search all over for a tool or measuring device such as a calipers or micrometers.

These methods have been proven to be most effective. I have really noticed the difference from before we started doing this to now. I work in the quality office and it makes my job a lot easier and efficient when I don't have to look through every fixture to determine which one I need. The fixtures and gages are all labeled and where they go are labeled so I know where they are located at all times all I have to do is reach to where they are and grab them without having to think is this the right fixture or gage.

If more companies would implement this procedure I think they would find it more to their benefit than not. It also makes your work environment look more professional and your customers will see this and be more impressed with the orderly fashion your business is run.

Do you remember the Scott Adams riff on ISO9000 certification? Everything is labelled "Asset 35928," "Asset 47629," "Asset 29450," etc.

Pretty soon we could have a CR4 question, "What is the exact formula to calculate asset numbers for shop equipment? Urgent! Plz reply."