Entering the great unknown: Managing the coming chaos for manufacturing

Identifying risks and planning for them will help metal fabricating and forming companies manage businesses moving forward as manufacturing and the economy start recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Getty Images

I’m writing from my home office. My printer stopped working. The refrigerator keeps calling my name. All things considered, they are minor inconveniences that can be cured with a little money and willpower. The biggest challenges lie ahead for most of us. We are quite literally entering the great unknown as the economy starts recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even with that uncertainty, you can be confident in moving forward. You can manage the oncoming issues with forethought, planning, and a lot of patience.

Unwanted things will happen. They happen daily during normal times. The two biggest differences will be that many of these things will happen in a compressed time frame, and you must be actively and visibly aware of employee health and safety. A simple off-the-cuff list of expected disruptions for metal formers and fabricators include:

• Fractured supply chains.
• Logistical networks that need to reconfigure and move their equipment to the right places.
• Protecting the health and safety of returning employees.
• The absence of some employees to return to work.
• Costs and issues of restarting idled equipment, such as start-up energy surges, maintenance needs for fatigued equipment, and time needed to get back up to normal cycle times.
• Managing stockpiles of formed components and blanks.
• Cleaning lubricant systems (especially for lubricants that contain solids).

Of course, many more potential pitfalls exist beyond my brief list. Our biggest challenge will be to anticipate issues and plan for their occurrence. Your best opportunity to convert chaos into productive action is first to conduct a thorough risk analysis. If you anticipate issues, rank them by criticality, and work to prevent failures, you will be better able to restart as smoothly as you can. Unexpected issues will happen. If you anticipate them and plan for their repair, your disappointment and frustration will be minimized. You will be able to focus more of your time on producing quality components and maintaining the physical and emotional health of your employees.

Assessing Risk

Probably the most important action you can take is a complete assessment of your situation. Your assessment should include the following categories.

Goals and Considerations for Restart. Define your goals for operational restart and continuation. These should cover time frame for restart, scope of production, and employee requirements over time. The goals include economic issues (budget, production cost changes, and revenue projections), production plans (required component volumes, production cycles, and maintenance planning), and employee expectations (health, safety, economic and emotional support, motivation, and productivity).

Goals will be influenced by outside forces. Determine how suppliers, customers, and regulations affect the goals.

Also, assess competitive risks. The organization needs to understand where it stands among its peers.

Current Situation Analysis. Define your current situation. What are current production levels? What is the condition of equipment? Is there available input stock? Are formed components available? What are current needs to fulfill customer orders? What are expected orders? What is the availability and status of every employee.

The next step is defining expected influencing factors. What are the regulatory support and constraints? What are the economic constraints? What is customer demand? What are the organizational challenges? What are the potential political issues?

Risk Analysis and Preventive Actions. From an operational perspective, this covers known equipment maintenance status, startup without stressing utilities and equipment, risk posed by idled equipment and chemicals, critical maintenance issues, and aging impact of input stock. From an economic point of view, management must look at budget constraints on maintenance and staffing, prevention of unexpected costly incidents, and impact of reduced revenue stream on continuing production. As it relates to the employees, management needs to keep in mind their overall health, the impact of family and economic stress on their performance, and issues presented to employee safety.

Once you have defined the risks have been defined, determine your actions to minimize them. Analyze the criticality of each risk, and prioritize preventive and remedial actions.

Some of the tools you can use to complete your risk analysis include failure mode and effects analysis, fishbone diagrams, and reliability-centered maintenance processes. At this stage, the form doesn’t matter as much as defining your plans, defining your risks, and implementing actions to prevent unwanted events and to respond appropriately when they occur.

Preparing for Tomorrow

We are in a new, unusual world. Your best action for the days to come is to define your goals, plan your production startup, and prepare for the inevitable failures and challenges. You also might find opportunities in your plan.

As an example, employee health concerns should include procedures to minimize touches of shared surfaces and to require adequate sanitation of all touch surfaces. This is your opportunity to implement 5S practices. 5S encourages employees to identify the tools they need, put them where they need to be for efficient operation and repair, keep them clean, standardize procedures for usage, and continuously maintain the discipline of caring for tools. 5S alone will help your employees prevent the sharing of illnesses.

Nobody expects restarting the global economy to be easy. However, with a solid plan, a consistent message from leadership, and continuous communication, you can reduce the risk of serious missteps and attain the support of your employees.