We’ve all had that day at work where nothing seems to go right. You get to work late, your boss is going crazy, every one at work seems to be slacking. Nothing is moving along as it should.
Even with all of this said, the company is still producing. You’re still making and selling products. You’re still functioning as a person and as a company, even with the slowdown that has occurred.
What happens if there is a Whole Operation Downtime? What I mean by WOD is when a specific event or set of events occurs that disrupts the flow of business to the point of failure. Anyone who has ever studied quality assurance, “Just on Time” or Supply/Demand systems knows this concept well. WOD disruptions can be divided into a few categories.
Single Point of Failure Personnel Failures – These kinds of failure happen when there is a single point of failure with an employee and there exists no method of re-routing his or her activities to another entity. This happens mostly with engineers, developers, coordinators and others who have a sole responsibility to a set of tasks and no one else has the training and knowledge and experience to perform those tasks. Whenever this person is sick or distracted, a point of failure occurs in this process.
Multiple Point of Failure Personnel Failures – These failures occur when there are mulitple failures, perhaps in a whole department, that lead to a breach in production. Things like labor strikes are a good examples of this. Another good example of this is when a department is re-organized or re-assigned, their tasks are often divided amongst the rest of the staff, creating a temporary or permanent breach in a once-working system.
Materials Limitations/Failures – These are the failures that are found primarily in supply and demand systems. Materials don’t reach a manufacturing point in time, materials are flawed, materials are damaged or materials are otherwise incorrect. This kind of flaw results in increasing costs both for the labor involved (who are unable to produce) and for the production costs needed to remedy the situation. Most of the time, these are temporary failures or failures that can be re-routed to produce similar results through another method.
Any of these production failures could lead to a “whole operation downtime”, which could lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue. How do you keep this from happening? Redundancy! Build redundancy, multiple supply lines, cross trained personnel and accountability into every task and every supply avenue. While it may still happen, the chances of it happening become less and less.
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