What Could Be Going Wrong – Part 3

In my last two messages I’ve described an event that happened when I was just beginning my career. We’d received a large order for lab table tops from a hospital in San Francisco.

We’d begun the order and mixed several batches of resin. Unexplainably they all had a different tint. This would be disastrous if we’d made the order with the different colored resins. What we did was mix all the resins together and made the order without any problems. We still make that product today, but not in that color.

The valuable lesson I’d learned from that experience was – when watching production processes, I don’t ask myself, “Is everything OK?”. I ask myself, “What could be going wrong?” As mentioned in previous messages, it was a great learning experience and I’ve used that question many times over my career and prevented a great deal of scrap.

Coincidentally, on that day a long time ago, as I was watching the resin being mixed and thinking “what could be going wrong”, it occurred to me that he might be using the wrong pigment. I asked for the container of pigment to check it out and, sure enough, it was the wrong pigment. It turned out that wasn’t the problem with the different tints (it was the order the pigments were introduced into the resin), but I did prevent a mistake that would have made the problem unsolvable.

My advice – as you’re walking the shop floor ask yourself what could be going wrong.