At one plant inside a major global food and beverage company, the numbers described an operation running on fumes. OEE was below 40%, and more than $6.5M in opportunity was lost to production inefficiencies.
Turnover explained a lot of it. More than a quarter of the workforce left each year. And while turnover is common in their space, the problem was compounded because they had no structured onboarding or training to capture and share what experienced operators knew. Each new hire effectively was learning by whomever they happened to be working nearby.
We deployed our standardization playbook, starting where the stakes were highest. We shadowed operators in their actual roles to see how work flowed through the plant. We then ranked the tasks through a criticality matrix to focus on the tasks that our the most.
We then went line by line through a sequence: failure analysis, process evaluation, task description, task criticality, evaluation and development, and finally training and audits. The 26 most frequent issues we uncovered were given their own failure analysis triggers, with prepared responses for each.
We invested heavily in training content and documentation, auditing and rewriting materials from the operator's perspective. Rather than the dense procedure document format they had been using, we made heavy use of checklists, visual guides and color codes to make knowledge transfer easier.
Last, we trained the trainers. We created SOP-based training plans and designed a coaching cadence for the plant's continuous improvement team.
The plant now runs on documented standards & audits for most of its critical work, and a local team equipped to train every new hire the same way. While turnover still happens, they now have the knowledge management apparatus to make those transitions easier.
We focused our efforts on the areas where failure was most expensive rather than trying to standardize everything. The modern, more user-friendly training materials met the operators where they actually did their work. And the train-the-trainer structure helped make the knowledge management capability a core competency.