Making Do

Several years ago I was driving home from North Carolina late one night. Tiring, I stopped at a rest area for a quick nap. Upon awakening, the battery was too weak to start the car. A helpful soul stopped, but neither one of us had any jumper cables. He said that it wouldn’t be a problem. He pulled his car up to mine until the bumpers touched and then proceeded to use the jack handle to span between the positive battery terminals. Holding the handle down tightly he instructed me to start the car. I was skeptical, but by gosh, it worked!

Even when the right tools are not available, creative people find a way to get the job done. They just “make do!”

From my early years in the auto industry, I became accustomed to workplaces customized with cardboard padding and duct tape to make-up for the ergonomic comfort that the engineers left out.

My own first warehouse “make do” was in a four-story warehouse building with a freight elevator to get products up and a spiral chute to get them down. Before distributed printing was common, getting orders to the upper floors was tedious. To improve it, we cut small holes in the floors and installed a rope over pulleys, top and bottom. Clips on the rope held orders on the “clothes line” as they were raised to the next floor. A doorbell signaled that they were on the way.

At the same company, we had a common product label on which we stamped the part number for the products coming off the production line. The labels were then placed on the end of the boxes. As both a cost reduction and productivity improvement, we found that our box supplier could easily print a blank label on the end of the box. And, to keep from double handling the self-inking stamp, we mounted it on the packing bench with a metal guide to permit the operator to push the box against the stamp, rotating its print head. Presto! – print and apply.

My partner, Bob Ouellette started his career in a small appliance factory. He recalls that they had a great deal of difficulty maintaining just the right tension on the fabric for the heating pad covers. The engineers struggled with it until one day an operator appeared with a fishing pole. With a little special rigging, it did the job for years. It became the highlight of every plant tour.

Last month, I was in a facility in Canada. The warehouse manager, Joe Fiorello, didn’t have the benefit of a WMS to support the operation. But, he created a couple of clever “make do’s.” When product was low in a forward picking position, pickers released a spring-loaded flag from under the rack beam. As it waved in the aisle, it was a very visible signal to the replenishment operator to bring a new pallet.

At a large mail order house in England, it was important that each picker finish his, or her batch in 18 minutes flat to feed an indexing delivery conveyor to the sorter induction stations. Each picker was rated for their demonstrated picking rate and assigned a number of pick lines accordingly. The dispatcher had mounted a measuring stick on the bench so that as a picker announced his, or her rating, fan-folded labels could be stretched along the table to the corresponding mark. What a simple work-balancing tool.

We’ve all seem the broomsticks, poles and home made hooks for clearing jams on conveyors or in flow racks. I believe that by carefully observing the way the operators “make do,” we could learn a lot more about the details of work-place engineering.

A substitute example, if needed.

In a pick-and-pass system with R.F. terminals, operators needed to scan the order label on the carton to see if there was a pick in their assigned aisles. If there was none, they pushed it on. The pickers found that since the next pick was always displayed after a pick was completed, if they noted the aisle on the carton, it could easily be passed on without scanning for those aisles with no picks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James M. Apple, Jr. is a Director in The Progress Group. Prior to co-founding The Progress Group in 1991, he was a Partner with Coopers & Lybrand's SysteCon division. During 1992-1995 he served as a Senior Systems Advisor with Vanderlande Industries, a major conveyor and systems provider in Europe.

Jim is an internationally recognized thought leader in the area of facility design and integrated distribution systems. His contributions to the improvement of distribution practices have been recognized by his receipt of the prestigious Reed-Apple Award, which is given for lifetime contributions to the advancement of the material handling profession. Jim has also received the Institute of Industrial Engineers' Facilities Planning and Design Award. He has written numerous articles and handbook chapters on warehousing and logistics operations and is a popular speaker on logistics seminar and conference programs.

Prior to SysteCon, Jim worked as an Industrial Engineer with IBM, was Supervisor of Facilities Planning for the Oldsmobile Division of General Motors and was Executive Vice President for an automotive aftermarket parts supplier. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.