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Apr 20, 2022 | Time to read: 4 min
Tim Coleman is a member of the sales team at Drishti. He has years of experience building relationships in manufacturing and creating value for customers.
Drishti works with some of the largest and most mature lean manufacturers in the world with well-established processes and standardized work systems. Accepting a new system is not the easiest thing to do in any scenario; however, since introducing Drishti, many of our customers have seen drastic benefits.
For example, Drishti’s automotive and medical device manufacturing customers have experienced significant benefits, including:
Reducing defect rates by 50% on lines with very low escape defect rates (~0.001%), in just 3 months (vs. years)
Improving throughput by 15% on already optimized lines
Reducing scrap rates by 15%
Reducing time to train new line associates by 50%
Enabling deterministic root cause analysis in minutes (vs. months)
The numbers are industry-changing, and in many cases were attained in processes where it was believed that the threshold of human capability was achieved. Now these customers are realizing that they are only scratching the surface of what is possible.
For a new system to work, particularly one that brings a completely new technology into the factory, the organization must be open to change, provide the resources needed to be successful and follow through completely. This means buy-in and support from leadership as well as acceptance from the people using the system. The workers using the tools need to believe in the solution.
This is a hard pill to swallow sometimes. I’m hard-pressed to find anyone who likes the idea of being on camera for a long period of time—potential Orwellian fears arise from the words AI-powered vision systems. Workers wonder if the tools are going to be some kind of eye in the sky where their every move will be viewed and mistakes will result in punitive measures.
Drishti focuses on processes, not people
In a manufacturing problem, there are really only three things that can go wrong:
Part failure (including raw materials for assembly, tools for the job and equipment)
Process failure
Performance error (mistake)
In our experience, people are rarely the cause of a failure, and in the event that a person is having difficulty, more often than not it stems from poor training, unclear expectations or a failure of one of the first two categories (parts or process).
Trust is a two-way street. While many of our customers reported that their workers were wary of Drishti technology at first, both managers and their employees quickly began to see the benefits. The leaders were able to see improvements in productivity and, in several cases, improved worker conditions.
What really got the Drishti team excited was the positive feedback we got from line-level workers. With Drishti, they have a clearer way to report their issues, such as materials flow problems or ergonomic challenges, to leadership. They were able to receive instant feedback and re-training with areas of difficulty. They were also able to review data and video with managers to address issues when something went wrong.
For example, check out this excerpt from Wired magazine: “Workers at Denso were initially wary of the prospect of being video-recorded all day to feed machine-learning algorithms, but Huffman says they have since come to appreciate Drishti’s technology. After something goes wrong, workers can now look at the data and video with their managers, instead of having to hope bosses take their account of what happened seriously.”
Maybe most importantly to them, they were able to prove that a defect or error was not caused at their station, or even during the assembly process, mitigating any finger-pointing both internally at each other or from the outside customer. We saw actual high-fives as line workers viewed the Drishti footage vindicating them from any blame.
Line workers are our allies
Under the pressure of a manufacturing environment with deadlines and production goals pressing on the team, it’s not easy to stop and ask for help or feedback on the line. Drishti is making it easier for supervisors to pinpoint where help may be needed; it is simplifying the process of providing assistance through video and data; and it is making it easier for workers to tell their side of the story using video.
Finally, Drishti helps supervisors and line associates work together to problem-solve. While line workers have the capability to press onward and solve their own problems, organizations shouldn’t want them to do this forever, potentially keeping the same problems coming back over and over again.
This Forbes article talks about how DENSO supervisors and line workers used Drishti to improve a bottleneck station: “In one case on the test line, managers were able to confirm that a worker’s idea to rebalance a line to rid it of bottlenecks was smart before they made a costly change to operations based on someone’s gut.”
Drishti supports the worker as much as it helps organizations as a whole. The tools are not about grading an individual worker, but having clear feedback about the quality of a process. In this way, we are empowering workers to do more than ever before and enabling continuous improvement by updating old methods of process measurement and analysis.
Drishti’s goal is to empower people and allow them to do more than ever before. For more information about how Drishti can help your line associates read our full datasheet on how Drishti benefits line associates.
