the Factory Floor

If you have ever spent time in a shop, you have seen it: piles of scrap material pushed into a corner, scattered across the floor, or sitting in a box waiting to be thrown out. I have always wondered: if you took that scrap and reworked it, how much value could you recover?

One of my first jobs was on a factory floor. I was eighteen, working the night shift—6:00 PM to 6:00 AM—at a company that made step-up and step-down electrical transformers. Eventually, I worked my way onto the day shift, but those early days stuck with me. That was the first time I saw how far the distance was between the “office” and the “factory floor.”

Every once in a while, I would see plant managers walking the floor with an engineer or supervisor. They would come through trying to solve a problem, reduce mistakes in the windings, improve efficiency, or fix some metric that looked off in a report. But there were technicians on that floor, guys with decades of experience, who understood those problems in a completely different way. Inevitably, the manager or engineer would come and go without ever talking to them. Those decision makers left a lot of knowledge on the floor.

Companies like Home Depot who require employees to work an eight-hour shift every quarter in their retail stores will reap the benefits. I hope we see more companies and decision makers start grow to value the knowledge left at the front lines.

Last week, I left the office and visited one of the factories. Additional procedures and protections, while sometimes necessary, have a direct impact on the business and can slow operations and reduce profitability. It made me wonder how many creative solutions exist that could protect the company’s interests without impacting productivity, and how many of those ideas are missed because we never ask the people who might have the answer.

There is a tremendous amount of knowledge on the front lines and on the factory floor. The people doing the work often already have the answers to the questions being asked in the conference room.