REFLECTION - VISUALIZATION &

ETHNOGRAPHY

Challenge

As a college trainee, I had my internship in a process industry under the Industrial Engineering  Department. Compared to product industries, process industries have a less efficient process  flow as it is highly craftsmen dependent. This basic quality adds a human centric approach to  the overall productivity and efficiency of the organization. Luckily, As an intern itself, i was  assigned a project to enhance the efficiency of a production line with high value generation to  the organization. On analysing the historic data. I found a lot of discrepancies, the data was  focussed more on quantity, than quality. Which made me reluctant to use this data as the  source of my further actions, and I decided to conduct a deep study of the production line on my  own and to visualize it.

Selection

To complete the challenge, a greater insight was needed in the day to day difficulties faced by  the shop floor operators and possible improvements possible, for this reason, Ethnography  design tool was chosen.   ​Ethnography is a qualitative research method used in design thinking and other  human-centered design disciplines. Ethnography takes three forms: observation, immersion  and engagement. With observation you get the most “realistic” data as you’re observing  what people are actually doing, not what they say they would do. Immersion puts you into  the experience so that you can become part of what you’re interacting with and collect data  accordingly. And finally, engagement allows you to interact with people typically  interviewing them to have a conversation around what you’re interested in.  The insights gathered through ethnography are used to analyze the problem and many  times reframe it allowing you to solve these problems through human-centered design.  (VIDEO REFERENCE- the good kitchen story)  This was then put in tabular and graphical formats to help visualize the data effectively and  reach to elaborate conclusions.

Application

The production line consisted of 10 production cells, with 25 operators. The first step was to  befriend the operators in order to get more insights regarding the production line. It was  observed that there existed a large number of hidden, unspoken practices in every production  cell.

My next step was to shadow every operator and observe their daily routines. I then prepared a  format to record their daily behaviors. This was followed by a questionnaire on what problems  they faced and what improvements would they suggest. A happy worker would directly imply  better production by the virtue of the nature of the industry.  I intended on eliminating waste practices along with ergonomics to increase the production line  efficiency.

Insight

By applying the The ethnography design tool and visualization , i was able to gather substantial  insights to carry out the changes that would impact the production line greatly. The insights  were as follows:-    Unlike the previous data, the new data showed a completely different approach. The previous  data showed that high time consuming cells should be targeted, but it was now  found that  although higher time consuming, the red cluster cells (shown in the charts) are contributing to  more “non-value added” time, compared to the other cells. Hence it was concluded that these  cells should be taken into consideration to improve the efficiency of the line.

These insights were only possible as the operators gave perfect direction as to what the root  cause of inefficiency was.

Approach

Given that my team had already gone through several design thinking activities/tools and were  at this stage in the timeline, the ethnography tool with visualization is the appropriate tool. Now  the department needs to review the insight gained from the research and incorporate this insight  into efficiency improvement decisions in Future. Next step would be to have learning launches  to validate the insight, or form new one.

