Factories Are Chaotic

I often hear about how processes should be more in line with how factories operate, but I am not sure what that means. Perhaps, it relates to the reduction and control of defects, which we know a factory is constantly looking to reduce. However, as someone who has worked in a factory before, I know that that defect reduction comes at a hard price, mostly through learning from mistakes. Factories are chaotic places.

In my career I worked at two major factories in our area. The first was one that made food products, specifically hot dogs, sausages, and lunch meats. It was a fascinating process with how it was organized and kept clean. The other was a high tech assembly plant that made engineered products used in a multitude of other products, especially in military and aerospace. This wasn’t as interesting because it was hard to determine what we were even making most of the time but I did learn about high tech manufacturing. Two different factories, but seemingly the same problems. Issues with incoming material quality and delivery speed, call ins from key employees, important manufacturing equipment breaking, theft, injuries, bad specs, skill shortages, the list goes on and on.

I remember once a maintenance tech could not find his pocket flashlight after a shift, and out of an abundance of safety the plant disposed of all of the food product made in the room he was working in that day, which was a significant loss. The factory made it up though. Why? Factories are chaotic, but they are often resilient. They learn from their mistakes. If you ever go into a maintenance department in a factory, you will see lines drawn on the wall where tools should be. There will be a hard limit on what can be checked in and out from certain rooms. No wedding rings. No food or drink. All of those were hard lessons learned to reduce contamination.

So, it is not that factories produce low defects because they are orderly, well planned out places, it is because they are resilient and learn from their mistakes, because they are anything but chaotic. There is a mix of proactivity and reactivity from what I have seen, but there are always bumps that need to be smoothed over.