magnet-schultz

overview

background

Magnet-Schultz is an international design and manufacturing company with over 550 million dollars in annual sales and over 2,500 employees. They specialize in solenoids and other electromechanical parts.

Part of my role as an MSA employee was to be an agent of "continuous improvement" - that is, to be hunting for potential innovations to their assembly process. This included ways to make our processes faster, safer, or more precise.

This was an especially educational experience for me because of how different it was from anything I had done before. MSA is a lean, agile company that keeps its staff well-engaged, which left me doing my own research on most aspects of the factory's day-to-day operations, from the basics onwards.

Once I had familiarized myself with the manufacturing floor operations, I would break my hunt for innovation into four main phases: research, concept development, prototyping, and validation.

research

My first task was to become knowledgeable on the what's, how's, and why's of factory life. Here I relied on 3 distinct research techniques: interviews, time studies, and immersion.

interviews

I took care to get different specialists' perspectives on our processes: what did and didn't work and how they wished our processes were different.

Because MSA was so busy it was a challenge to get key employees' perspectives. I was able to work by bringing employees coffees, snacks, and lunches, and conducting informal interviews while they ate.

immersion

Early on, one particularly helpful method was to work as a factory worker myself. This offered crucial insights into how policy translated into the lived experience of or workers, what their needs are, how to improve their lives, what corners were tempting to cut, and why.

time studies

My time studies proved to be my most valuable form of research. On a typical day I would spend hours observing our assembly workers, parsing their workflow into smaller processes, and collecting data on each processes' time to complete.

Over time I was able to build a large dataset that detailed the time to complete of every major operation in MSA's assembly area. This was key in building an objective picture of our processes' bottlenecks, and - perhaps more importantly - a means to quantify our processes in terms of cost.

concept development

I worked on concept development in tandem with my research. For every discovery about a process, I investigated the following: "why do we do things this way? Do we need to do things this way? Could we do this better?"

I quickly discovered that our engineers had put an impressive degree of thought behind every aspect of its processes. As a mature factory, MSA often measured its process improvements in seconds or fractions of seconds.

early ideation

One early candidate for innovation I identified was our testing setup. Operators spent a considerable proportion of their time mounting, dismounting, and babysitting parts under test. One test in particular was potentially hazardous, relying on operator vigilance to protect themselves from a strong electrical current.

sketching

One early candidate for innovation I identified was our testing setup. Operators spent a considerable proportion of their time mounting, dismounting, and babysitting parts under test. One test in particular was potentially hazardous, relying on operator vigilance to protect themselves from a strong electrical current.

I sketched out a concept for an integrated testing device, assembled from MSA's other testing devices, which would allow an operator to safely conduct an arbitrarily large battery of tests hands-free.

early testing

I estimated the concept's time-saving potential by timing myself with a cardboard prototype and comparing their figures, in terms of cost, with my time study data. I presented this information to the Manufacturing Engineering department, who felt the project had promise and put me in charge of a project to develop a functional prototype.

prototyping

In this phase I worked as a project manager. I worked with key personnel in Design and Manufacturing Engineering departments to understand each department's needs, with our tool room to design and build our test fittings, and with our electrician to design and build the switching device.

Early on, I established a check-in schedule with our personnel, maintained a Gantt chart to keep management apprised of the project's progress, and worked to personally take as much work from our key personnel as possible.

building buy-in

MSA is a fast-paced company. Because of its unpredictable workflow and urgent demands, it initially proved challenging to get key personnel to commit to our project and deadlines.

As a team, we overcame this challenge by individually presenting the reluctant departments' management figures with the case our project according to whatever metrics that department was looking to maximize. This afforded productive conversations with each management team that helped us all to cooperatively come to understand the project's merit relative to other MSA demands. We drew on this mutual understanding to commit to a timetable and carve out time for our key personnel to work.

reaping the rewards

From there on my role as a project manager became simpler - mostly by creating documentation for the test device and generally making sure our members' needs were being met.

Ultimately our work was successful. Our finished prototype was safer and faster to use than our existing set-up, and it fell well within our budget.

From there the project passed out of my hands. We created a budget item to build and refit our assembly floor in the coming fiscal year and congratulated ourselves on a job well done.