Check For Understanding

Pre-Flight Checks Are Critical
Who Could Understand Better?

One of the teams I am working with is in the middle of an Autonomous Maintenance (TPM) launch.  The team has been doing a good job of identifying defects on their equipment and correcting these defects seems to be helping.  The team had been doing the inspections on the weekend during non-production time so there had been less pressure to get the inspections done quickly.

That changed recently when they started to do these inspections mid-week.  The line is being shut down at shift change to allow both shifts to participate in the inspection.  Valuable production time is being invested into these important checks.  We decided to make specific assignments  to each operator off the inspection check list.  The idea was that we need to be as efficient as possible since we are cutting into valuable production time.

The team performs their inspection and it seems to go well.  We meet for a quick debrief before sending first shift home for the day.  This is when the surprise comes.  One of the operators starts asking questions about their checks even though the team had been doing the checks for some time.  The surprise of the day is that the team had been doing the checks and marking the check list as complete, yet they did not understand all of the individual inspection requirements.

Have you seen anything like this?  How do you guard against this kind of knowledge gap? How do you check for understanding? Do you have any success stories to share?

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