BEST and WORST Practices

Best practices are interesting because they point towards a “True North” that we can use to evaluate our current direction.

Worst practices are useful because they can help us avoid stupidity. Perhaps they can be thought of as “True South” (where True North is our desired destination).

So…let’s think about Best and Worst Practices for building trustworthy and robust manufacturing processes, step by step.

Step 1:

Create MANUFACTURABLE and scalable research concepts.

Best Practices

• Develop the right metrics for the process and product. This is much easier said than done; oftentimes new measurement methods and concepts are needed.

• Use theory and simulation to predict scale-up behavior as much as possible.

Worst Practices

• Researchers are indifferent about production impact.

• Researchers who conduct non-designed experiments, aka dabbling.

Step 2:

Minimize time from first prototype to full-scale manufacturing.

Best Practices

• Be sure you can consistently make key samples of interest at will, and that you have not supplied a customer a “lucky” sample they love but you cannot make again.

• Key technical experts have the courage and management support to recommend stopping their projects, if appropriate.

Worst Practices

• Equipment that does not address the (true) process needs and ultimately becomes an expensive “boat anchor”.

• NOT ruthlessly and repeatedly evaluating the manufacturability of the process (in a disciplined and systematic format): THIS IS VITAL.

Step 3:

Engineer robust & trouble-free production processes.

Best Practices

• Life-cycle impacts have been examined and optimized where possible.

• Look extremely carefully for new problems that surface as sample sizes increase.

Worst Practices

• Product quality is insured by inspection, not via process robustness.

• Why the process works is neither understood nor documented.

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My main learning from this line of thinking is the power of simultaneously considering both Best and Worst Practices. Doing this is actually using the “Inversion” mental model, which is a well-established and very useful framework. Seasoned process builders consider these Best and Worst Practices instinctively, and they value making these approaches explicit so they can be used repeatedly, to permit a “compounding” of process knowledge over time.

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YOUR CHALLENGE THIS WEEK

Please think about your efforts building new processes or improving existing processes, over the past 5-10 years…

• Do any of the Worst Practices ring true? How can you improve future efforts by systematically avoiding these problems?

• Spend 30 minutes quickly developing your own list of Best and Worst Practices for the 3 steps outlined above for YOUR PROJECTS. Did anything surface that can be directly applied to a current high-priority project?

We would love to hear from you about your Best and Worst Practices. Please email me at marty@martyschad.com, or call me at 508-410-8081.

All the Best,

Marty

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