Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1253723
JUNE 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 65 that because the workers are friends, and they eat lunch together." This was before I men- tioned that they could increase their salary by $5 an hour and still make more money. I replied, "Work something out where only one day a week, an operator does not eat with their friends. One day a week, it's their turn to be on the crew of five people that keeps the two lines going for half an hour. The other four days of the week, they get to go have lunch with their friends. If the company did that, they could increase the salary they're paying the workers by $5 an hour and still make more profit." They asked, "You mean for the lunch hour, right?" and I said, "No, for 40 hours a week." Their profit margins were so little that that modest improvement in productivity tre- mendously increased their profit margins. This is one of the things I teach at Dartmouth. I developed a software program called Profit- Pro™, where you can model these things and show that doing something like that, saving an hour and 20 minutes a day doubled or tripled profits because their profit was only 2–3% ini- tially. The reason for this strong increase in profitability is that the fixed costs have not increased, yet you are making more products. The unit costs go down for all assemblies, and the profit goes up for all assemblies. More profit on each assembly and more assemblies produced means that profits rise dramatically. I started writing a blog in 2005 when blog- ging was new and covered topics such as, "Do XYZ to improve your productivity and the quality of your stencil printing." I wrote about all topics related to electronics assembly, even if they aren't necessarily things that relate to solder. About five years into it, I thought, "This is getting kind of boring. Why don't I invent a few characters and have them portray true stories," like the ones I just shared. I posted blogs on these topics for 6–7 months, and then there were enough of them that we incorpo- rated them in a book. I gave a hard copy of this book to one of my associates and said, "All I ask you to do is read the first story, which is eight pages, and tell me what you think." He sent me a note and said, "It's too fantastical. Nobody could be this bad." He hadn't realized that the stories were all true—even the numbers. I've spent quite a bit of time encouraging folks to focus on productivity, but I get discouraged because I can't get anybody interested. You'd think they would be, but our business is run by what a pastor of a church I went to called the "tyr- anny of the urgent." People are scrambling all the time and only on urgent problems. "The line is down because we have a problem with the head-in-pillow defect, or something isn't working well." There's so much responding to crises that they don't want to do the type of things that will help them long term. I've been preaching this for more than 10 years now, so you get a little tired (laughs). Matties: When you tell people, what's their reaction? Why don't they want to change? Lasky: Again, the only thing I can say is, in most places, they're so busy putting out fires that they don't have time to go to the bath- Results of productivity audits reveal typical production lines run only 20% of the time.