In his famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey states that “Sharpening the Saw” is critical to remaining effective.
In our last newsletter, we discussed this idea and how Pearl Engineering is Sharpening our Saws to be “Building a Better Pearl.”
Today, we want to focus on how our clients can apply this ideal to be “Building a Better Factory.”
During this current COVID-19 economic downturn, many manufacturers have reduced production or have temporarily closed some of their process lines as well as a constricted capital investment in order to reduce costs. As a small business, we fully understand, respect, and have to do the same.
During this slow time, we would encourage our clients to consider “Sharpening their Saws” in maintenance, production, and safety improvements that they may have been putting off and could be done now while they are waiting to return to full production.
These may include:
- Outage required inspections and maintenance;
- Access platform additions;
- Safety enhancements such as:
- fall protection,
- guarding and
- ladder upgrades;
- Maintenance-related improvements such as:
- installation of lifting beams,
- ratings of pick points and monorails,
- modifications to piping for easier pump replacements in the future.
Many of these may just be quick turn around and low budget projects that could be executed immediately. They may include getting into busy or congested production areas to perform 3D scanning without interference with operations or just working out solutions on the floor with the maintenance department.
Another famous book is: Great by Choice, written by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen in which they studied how Luck can affect a company’s success. They found that: although all company’s experience both good luck and bad luck the truly successful companies find a way to reap a Return on their Luck.
Obviously, most companies and people are experiencing some level of bad luck with the current Pandemic and Economic Slowdown.
So in this regard, we ask: how is your organization going to create a positive return on this bad luck, in order to come out stronger and more productive when it passes?
Please let us know how we can support your operations and maintenance groups to help your factory have Sharpened Saws ready for the return of the economy.
