Hit 200 widgets in an hour for the first time yesterday at the warehouse

Our team lead mentioned we were averaging 150 and I just assumed that was normal until I counted our actual output and realized we were wasting 20 minutes a shift on recalibrating the machine, so I spent my lunch fixing the alignment sensor and now we're cruising - anyone else find a bottleneck that was hiding in plain sight?

3 comments

3 Comments

johnson.river3d agoMost Upvoted

A buddy of mine works at a print shop and they were constantly running behind on big orders. Everyone just blamed the machine being old. Turns out they were loading paper in the wrong tray for half the jobs and it was double feeding every other sheet. An old timer showed them the right tray and their output jumped like crazy that same afternoon.

amyh123d ago

Oh man, that is such a classic thing! @johnson.river I swear half the time when equipment seems "broken" it's just user error (been there myself way too many times). At my last job we had a copier that would jam on every single double-sided print job, and everyone was ready to throw it out the window. Turned out some genius had loaded the paper with the wrong side up and the machine just could not handle it. Once we flipped the stack, it ran smooth as butter for months.

simonk983d ago

Ask @johnson.river if his buddy ever figured out why the old timer knew which tray was the right one, or was it just trial and error? Seems like those little details are the difference between "broken" equipment and a machine working perfectly fine. I've seen so many places waste hours blaming hardware when it was just someone not knowing the quirks.