Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 17

21 BASICS Back to Basics: Lessons from Your Mother…. Our sales team at Molten Metal Equipment Innovations spends lots of time in our customer's facilities and some time in our own facility. In both places, they are constantly presented with simple opportunities to do things that can significantly impact the business operation. Most of these things are known, and it generally is just a question of making them a priority. Just like my mother would tell me to clean my room, and I’d find a way to do anything but that, we all have simple ways to get back to some of the basics when it comes to cleanliness and maintenance. Re-committing to these activities can provide major benefits to your operational and financial performance, and improve employee and customer satisfaction. HOW IT LOOKS IS HOW IT RUNS Early in my working career, I had the opportunity to spend time with a mentor in our company who told me that you could learn most of what you needed to know about a (manufacturing) company by asking to use the bathroom. All bathroom doors remain closed, so it’s an easy place to hide a mess and to see what the company culture is all about. Clean bathrooms are generally found in companies where there is a culture that values how common spaces are maintained, and you would expect to see the same on the plant floor and in the offices. Dirty bathrooms generally are indicative of a company culture that does not value cleanliness and thus the operations reflect that same approach. This may be a bit too simplistic, but I would say that it has proven to be true more often than not, and that cleanliness is a basic that we should all embrace. In our own plant, this is a big deal as we machine graphite and thus create a lot of dust. The dust gets everywhere despite all the things we do to try to prevent that. It requires us to add preventative maintenance steps to ensure that our CNC equipment is not negatively impacted by this reality of our operation. To not do that would be very expensive. Given that most of our attention is in and around furnaces and pump wells, this is the biggest area of focus for us when visiting our Continued on next page JEFF KELLER CEO Molten Metal Equipment Innovations ARTICLE TAKEAWAYS: • How it looks is how it runs • Run it till it fails is flawed logic • Preventative Maintenance pays huge dividends T he road to getting back to “normal” is definitely routed through get “back to basics” town. It’s time we do some thinking about how we can return to those things that are so easy to ignore, overlook, or more accurately, just choose not to do. Takes you 5 minutes to clean your pump well. Do it once a shift. Every shift. Every day.