Establishing standards
Establishing standards
(OP)
I am working in an industry, where many people work on the same task, like assembling small pieces of jewels. How will I establish standards for this process?
Thanks
Thanks
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RE: Establishing standards
RE: Establishing standards
A sad drawback to many standards doumented within industry is that that took a lot of time and trouble to establish and that actively discourage alteration i.e. improvement.
Your standard should therefore have a mechanism to encourage study each of each operation and a means to impliment improvements.
JMW
www.viscoanalyser.com
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RE: Establishing standards
Change must be driven by management. Management must allocate resources for improvements and follow through with implementation resources to complete the improvements. Even in the improvements using the impact wrench and torque wrench, if management does not supply the funds for the impact wrench or the torque wrench the improvements cannot occur.
RE: Establishing standards
You are absolutely right in that the standard system by itself will not assist in improving standards. Nothing will except a comitment by all that that is an objective.
I have witnessed standards schemes where it was as if they were carved in stone. Once written, never changed.
The tool must be capable of the job and there must be a willingness to use the tools.
Alignment is what is required. As you say, there must be a top down commitment to continuous improvement.
In some cases this means anticipating what is required and making sure that the standard does refelect this even in some simplistic way.
No matter how simple or complex the operation, recognised quality standards are a critical part of how a company operates and often subject to independant audit.
I am simply suggesting that changing the procedures is easier if the standard has that facility written into it otherwise even a small change can cause a problem because the standard itself is imutable.
This is an increasingly specialised area. There are many good web sites to visit on ISO 9000 and similar. If you don't have an ISO 9000 approval you may wish to anticipate it.
JMW
www.viscoanalyser.com
Eng-Tips: Pro bono publico, by engineers, for engineers.
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.
RE: Establishing standards
While I agree that a standard labor system is a poor vehicle for driving efficiency improvement, it is a useful way to account for and document the actual effectiveness of process improvement efforts.
Regards,
RE: Establishing standards
Time standards used to set standard cost and for line balancing are important activities however measuring efficiency is a waste of resources if taken to the detail level. An example is a laser, plasma or flame cutting operation using nesting. I have seen plate nests which have contained 20 different components per sheet and each sheet having a different nest. Logging time to each part and each work order is worthless. You can at the end of the day log the quantity of each part produced and calculating the standard earned hours and the actual worked and come up with and overall efficiency.
Direct labor for most U.S. companies makes up less than 10% of the manufacturing costs. The last company I worked it was between 6-7%. Maintaining and updating small standard variations is not value added.
Quality standards are very important however ISO 9000 is not a quality standard. ISO 9000 is a paperwork standard. A company creates its individual quality manual which must contain certain ISO 9000 documented processes and then the company is audited on how it performs to its own quality processes. An example is an approved vendor list. An ISO 9000 auditor will veryify the list exists and is current and any changes have been proformed per the quality manual.
Time standards in general are management tools which if used incorrectly can add cost to your product. They are necessary to cost your product and for overall goal setting for the manufacture of a product.
RE: Establishing standards
Some people maintain that the fact that a company establishes standards and consistently uses them can influence the overall performance by thirty percent or more.
Our company does not require continual updating of standards but adopted the guideline that updating is only necessary if it changes process time of a PRODUCT by ten percent or more. This gives me considerable latitude in deciding when to update standards.
This said,have we answered Ven's original question?
Griffy