27 COMMUNICATION ISSUE JACK PALMER President Palmer Manufacturing & Supply, Inc. ARTICLE TAKEAWAYS: • Ensuring comprehension • Seeing is believing Review, Restate & Verify As a custom, machinery, design and build company, communication is absolutely critical and the difference between delivering custom equipment on-time, or reworking it on the shop floor and delivering late. . In this article I am going to discuss the importance of our internal production floor communication as well as the different methods we use to verify to our customers the various custom technologies we deploy. Everything happens on the production floor. New ideas, enhanced automation, control panels that continue to do more, welding, machining, and more, all takes place on the production floor. In a custom shop like ours, every piece of equipment, is different. Having floor assemblers that understand the task at hand is paramount. REVIEW & RESTATE A few years ago, I watched how a production manager taught our floor assemblers to not only listen, but to comprehend. Our manager typically gave these pretty common instructions to the floor assembler: "Torque the shaft set screws to 50 pounds, re-run a continuous ground wire from the mixer operator enclosure all the way back to the main control panel with no terminals involved, center paint the discharge of the machine safety, yellow.” Then he asked the employee to restate what he had said. I was amazed when I heard: "Tighten the set screws, check the ground wire Continued on next page
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