For Immediate Release
Benchmarking
MISSION VIEJO, March 10, 2005 –
From Meat Processing Magazine (printer friendly .pdf download)
High personnel costs and tight margins make productivity a constant concern in the meatpacking industry. While realistic labor standards can help a processor assess performance, getting employee buy-in on the “realistic” aspect is not always automatic.
For example, beef, pork, and lamb processor Swift & Co. used to use stopwatches to study repetitive production jobs and establish staffing levels. The problem was that major differences surfaced in the amount of time individual workers spent completing the same tasks, as did distinctions from one plant to another.
Swift found it difficult to reconcile these differences in its efforts to develop labor standards that would be accepted by its workforce as both fair and accurate.
With time studies, you need a large sample size in order to overcome that natural variation among different people and different ways of doing things, explains Bill Crooks, Swift’s director of business solutions in Greeley, Colo. “We often felt that we were over-manned in some areas and under-manned in others. The result was that productivity suffered and workers sometimes questioned the fairness of the labor standard,” he says.
So when Crooks learned about the EASE system, a software program designed to help create manufacturing standards and method improvement through cycle-time reduction technologies, he had a high level of interest.
“Our product is a Windows-based software suite marketed under the umbrella EASEworks,” says Jack Mott, who heads up marketing and business development for the Mission Viejo, Calif., firm. Among the suite’s several modules are programs that address work standards, work instructions, line balancing, cost estimating, manufacturing data management, and ergonomics.
EASE comes preloaded with an extensive library of standard data elements, each of which consists of a very simple step—such as reaching for a knife—that can be combined with other steps to create tasks. The time required to perform each step has been determined through statistical analysis of a large sample universe, which eliminates the subjective dimension of less-inclusive time studies. Additional data elements can easily be added when necessary.
To create new benchmarks, an EASE customer generally begins by videotaping the same task in all the plants where it is performed in order to capture the different ways in which it is being done. Then company engineers use the data elements to construct a labor standard for the larger task that is normally defined on a per-head or per-piece basis. The permanent record of performance variations allows the engineers to objectively evaluate different approaches and promote best-practices while adhering to realistic expectations.
“Predetermined time standards depersonalize the work, as opposed to using a stopwatch on an individual, who could be either fast or slow,” points out EASE’s Mott. “As a union shop, Swift was able to gain agreement from its workforce that the time standards represent a fair and accurate measurement scheme.”
Swift started its EASEworks deployment with the development of labor standards for its Greeley beef plant. It was obvious from the beginning the new standards were far more accurate than the old approach, Crooks notes.
“The new software helped identify many cases where the old standards were too high and many others where the old standards were too low, primarily because the person being clocked was either exceptionally slow or exceptionally fast,” he relates.
The positive results spurred Swift to bring in industrial engineers from other facilities and extend the software roll-out, first to additional beef plants in Cactus, Texas, and Grand Island, Neb., and then to Nampa, Idaho, and Omaha, Neb. By June 2004, Swift had implemented EASE’s Work Standards in all its pork plants.
“The ability to compare the methods used by the different plants on videotape and separately time out each approach makes it possible to easily determine which methods are most efficient and convert all plants to the best practices,” remarks Crooks.
Swift has also populated the numbers developed by the program into the EASE line-balancing module to build the crewing guide for each facility.
“We calculate exactly how many people are needed to operate at certain product mixes and speeds and use this information as the foundation for our custom-scheduling program,” says Crooks. “The labor standards also go into our Kronos time collection system, where they are used to compare our actual labor usage with the standards.”
In addition, the videos help Swift address other workplace issues, from streamlining procedures to ergonomics. For example, engineers devising new equipment might see that one task requires dragging a cart 30 yards across the factory, so they change the equipment design so the material no longer needs to be moved. Or the safety coordinator reviewing a video can spot particular jobs with the potential for ergonomic risk and then bring in physicians for their advice.
The videos have also proven useful for training, especially for non-native English speaking employees. All new hires are shown the video for the job they are assigned to perform before moving onto the production floor.
Crooks points out that workers support the new standards because they understand how they were derived and know they are consistent across each department and plant.
“They can see that the jobs are more evenly matched and that stressors have been removed from jobs that were too difficult in the past,” he observes. “The result is that both absenteeism and turnover have been reduced since we put the new standards into practice.”
Finally, the videos also serve the purpose of ongoing process improvement as employees review them on a regular basis to suggest how to refine their jobs.
“The operators have become so involved in the process that, instead of having a handful of industrial engineers try to push change, we now have thousands of employees generating ideas that are moving our company to the next level,” Crooks concludes.
About EASE Inc.
EASE Incorporated was founded in 1986 with the goal of providing Industrial Engineers with a powerful and effective system to develop engineered labor standards. With the introduction of the EASE suite of software products, the company has become the leading supplier of cost effective software solutions for Industrial and Manufacturing Engineers in Manufacturing, Logistics, Retail and Clerical and Administrative environments. EASE Incorporated is recognized as a leading innovator in the field of Manufacturing Data Management for its products, systems integration, customization and engineering skills.
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