Reflection

TOOL:  Visualization

Diego Campo

Challenge & Selection

I work as a bodywork quality engineer at an automobile assembly company. The factory where I  work has a low percentage of automation and the welding processes are manual by operators.  Because of this there are many quality problems associated with poor welding application. We have  resorted to all kinds of strategies to find root causes, we have changed machines, installed aids in  the stalls and nothing worked. At that time, we realized that we were not really understanding the  needs of welders for them to apply welding well. They also did not understand the reasons why we  made so many changes in the factory, there was no effective communication. At that time, we  decided to use the visualization tool. As we saw in the first week of the course, this tool allows us to  activate different areas of the brain to understand information differently.

Application

To better understand the difficulties and problems of the operators, we decided to create  personalized meeting spaces. We formed groups of 4 workers together with 2 engineers from our  quality problem solving team. The first step in the meetings was to ensure that we all understood  the quality defects that we had in the same way, for this we used visual tools such as photos of the  defects, videos showing incorrectly applied welding beads and some cartoons that showed the basic  rules to follow. The second step in the meeting was the opposite situation, now the operators taught  us visually in the workplaces the difficulties they had in doing their job well, each worker went to  his post, carried out the operation and taught us his problems so that together we could find a  solution. Using visual language, it was easier to understand the problems. We tried to apply these  solutions quickly to experiment and obtain the changes we needed.

Insight & Approach

That was the best strategy we could have used. With visualization we really understood where our  problems were coming from and the workers understood the basic rules for executing their duties.  After 2 weeks of holding these meetings we had already detected the positions where quality  defects and their root causes were generated. Using the same work teams, we generated alternative  solutions for these problems and implemented some while production was stopped. Some solutions  were successful on the first attempt, for others it was necessary to iterate until optimal solutions

were found. This exercise showed us the great power of visual tools to truly understand people's  needs and get to the root cause of problems. At this time, we have already removed more than half  of the quality defects that we had before using the tool.

Now in the other areas of the factory they have started to use this technique and I am sure that they  will also have excellent results.

