From the WSJ, 7-1-2002 Tricks of the Trade: On Factory Floors, Top Workers Hide Secrets to Success --- Bosses Seeking Input to Boost Output Often Hit a Snag: Tight-Lipped Old Hands --- Mr. Fowler's `Voodoo' Accuracy
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Bill Fowler knows that knowledge is power. That's why the 56-year-old factory worker seldom tells anyone anything.
"If I gave away my tricks, management could use [them] to speed things up and keep me at a flat-out pace all day long," says Mr. Fowler.
His job here at Blackmer/Dover Resources Inc. is cutting metal shafts for industrial pumps. It's a precision task: A minor error could render a pump useless. Mr. Fowler, a 24-year plant veteran, is known for the accuracy of his cuts. His bosses also say he can be hours faster than anyone else at readying his giant cutting machines to shift from making one type of pump shaft to another. As they seek to incorporate employee know-how into the manufacturing process, they would love to know his secrets. But he refuses to share his best ones even with fellow workers.
"He hardly ever has made a suggestion for an improvement," says one co-worker, machinist Steve Guikema.
Though not all are as tight-lipped as Mr. Fowler, there are seasoned workers in nearly every American factory whose deviations from the standard production process make their work stand out. Seeking ways to cut costs and boost productivity amid the nation's economic slump, more managers are trying to document these workers' subtle shortcuts and other innovations, which are sometimes referred to as "tribal" or "voodoo" knowledge. Many workers, in turn, are resisting the effort, which they see as a threat to one of their few sources of power -- accumulated expertise.
"Some people conceal knowledge instinctively, because just knowing it gives them a little more bargaining power with management," says Mike Parker, an electrician at a DaimlerChrysler AG assembly plant near Detroit. "There's tremendous tension over this on factory floors," adds Mr. Parker, a labor activist who has written manuals for union workers on this and other workplace issues.
Paul Adler, a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California, believes workers have a predisposition to share knowledge but are often stopped by "fairly clear signals that management is going to use this knowledge to hurt them."
Workers have reason to worry. In the past, some companies have solicited workers' expert advice in the name of making their plants more competitive, only to turn around and move jobs to lower-wage locations in the U.S. or abroad. About 1.7 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have evaporated since the end of the 1990s boom, making job security the overriding concern of many factory workers.
At Blackmer, a unit of New York-based Dover Corp., top managers say they have no plans to relocate jobs or otherwise hurt workers. Rather, they say they're trying to pool workers' lore in an effort to make the plant stronger. "We've realized that to get competitive, we need to start asking these guys what they know," says Carmine Bosco, Blackmer's president.
Blackmer, founded in 1903, makes heavy-duty pumps designed to move commodities such as refined oil and propane gas, as well as food products such as chocolate and coconut oil. Until recently, Blackmer's workers stamped their initials on each pump they helped build.
The plant, whose 160 workers are represented by the United Auto Workers, usually assigned employees to operate the same machine for months or even years at a time. As a result, each worker became intimately familiar with a narrow task. That expertise translated into more money. Until 1997, about half the workers at the plant earned a premium, on top of their hourly wage, based on the number of pumps or pump parts they produced. The old system gave them a strong incentive to conceal output-enhancing tricks even from co-workers.
Today, the plant's workers receive a straight hourly wage. To make the facility more flexible, Blackmer's management encourages them to learn a variety of jobs and be willing to move around to different parts of the factory floor. Many of the plant's older workers, in particular, haven't welcomed the change.
Mr. Fowler, the shaft cutter, has no interest in learning other jobs. "I don't want to move around," he says, "because I love my routine -- it helps me get through the day." So, he keeps his know-how to himself as insurance against being assigned to an unfamiliar task.
On the floor of the Blackmer plant, "process sheets" hang over many of the workstations. The sheets, which display diagrams and specifications for pump parts, "existed for years, but they were very basic," says Thomas Madden, the plant's vice president of finance. "Only lately have we tried to make them more of a `how to' for the jobs -- to embody some of the tribal knowledge."
Some workers object to the newer-style sheets, fearing that they could be used to train replacement workers in the event of a strike. Other workers say they like using the sheets, instead of their own knowledge, to train new employees. That way, they say, if the greenhorn makes a mistake, the sheets are to blame.
Moreover, much employee know-how is hard to translate into words. For example, Gil Bancroft, 51, says he can tell the difference between the Teflon and neoprene O-rings that go into Blackmer's pumps without looking at them -- just by their feel in his hand.
Similarly, he can often tell what's wrong with a malfunctioning pump just by listening to it. "Every type of pump is a little different, every rotor has to be put in differently," says Mr. Bancroft. "It's knowledge you couldn't really write down if you wanted to."
Sitting in his office at the front of the factory, Mr. Bosco, Blackmer's president, agrees that it's almost impossible to document all of what he calls the "native intelligence" of his workers. There are so many variables that only someone who does a job from day to day can fully comprehend what's involved.
"People are inherently creative, and they can figure out how to make more and get paid for that, even though the instructions tell them otherwise." Mr. Bosco says. He says he understands why some workers are reluctant to share all they know.
Mr. Bosco was hired to head Blackmer last year, after the previous top manager retired in the wake of slumping sales and a disastrous attempt to overhaul the company's assembly operation. In place of the old system of assembling many pumps quickly and adding them to inventory, the new system sought to eliminate excess inventory by producing only the type and number of pumps ordered.
Assemblers no longer built most of a single pump at their own workstations. Instead, the task was broken up into a series of steps along a short assembly line. Mr. Bosco says the overhaul ended up slowing deliveries to customers, raising the company's costs and reducing job satisfaction among workers.
One of Mr. Bosco's first priorities was to undo the damage the overhaul had caused. For that, he needed his workers to tell him what went wrong and how to fix it. As they searched for solutions, both the plant's managers and workers agreed that the root of the problem was that former management hadn't given workers any input into the redesign. "They ignored our experience, because they thought any monkey could build pumps," says Mr. Bancroft, one of the plant's most seasoned pump builders.
Plans for the revamped production lines featured, among other things, overhead hoists that the workers themselves would have designed far differently. Consultants brought in by former management had figured the hoists were a great way to move heavy pumps from one spot to another. But once the pumps pass through a testing station at the end of the initial assembly process, they are dripping with lubricant. Moving the pumps with the hoists from that point on, to the area where they are painted and prepared for shipment, would have left the floors a slippery mess. Workers also would have had to dodge the hanging pumps as they traveled through narrow corridors.
Steve Taylor, who works in assembly, knew what was wrong. The workers designed a "spur line," a series of metal rollers, to move the pumps along like the conveyor on a supermarket checkout line. Mr. Taylor says he was pleased that the plant implemented the workers' ideas. "The most frustrating part of sharing your ideas is when nobody listens," he says.
Management often calls Mr. Taylor in as a troubleshooter when it is trying to figure out what's wrong with a pump or needs someone to build a difficult special model. He knows lots of little tricks, which he willingly shares.
For example, one type of pump has a tiny hole that's the only way to get lubricant into the mechanism. He knows from experience that these holes sometimes are only partially open or totally clogged, so he holds them up to the light to make sure he sees daylight through them. If the opening isn't wide enough, the pump might pass the plant's quality tests but would burn up quickly when put into operation in the field.
Another trick involves the small metal liner used in certain gasoline and propane pumps. The liner helps position parts so that the pump creates the vacuum necessary to transport fluids. If the liner isn't exactly the right thickness, the pump won't have enough drawing power. Long ago, workers at the plant noticed that the liners were slightly too thick, even though they met the plant's own specifications. On their own initiative, they began grinding the liners to the right thickness. But the plant never changed its specs. So, if a novice worker were to use a liner without grinding it, the affected pump wouldn't work, and the worker might never know why.
Daniel Spiegel, Blackmer's director of operations, ranks Mr. Taylor in the top tier of workers in terms of sharing his knowledge. Mr. Spiegel, who arrived here six months ago after working for several manufacturers, including Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., figures this plant is like most others. He says that between 10% and 20% of workers are willing to help management, between 10% and 20% aren't, and the vast majority can be swayed to share their knowledge.
Mr. Spiegel's strategy is to pinpoint workers who have influence with their peers, attempt to win them over and try to get them to convert others. He makes a point of working alongside the hourly workers to learn production processes in different sections of the plant and to learn what is on their minds.
Workers who share insights with management, such as Mr. Guikema, the machinist, sometimes catch flak from their peers. Open and talkative by nature, the 39-year-old is known for his ability to run his metal-cutting machines at top speeds without damaging them. The trick, he says, is distinguishing the subtle differences in the hardness of the steel parts he's machining into rotors. If the steel is too hard, running the machine too fast will rapidly wear down or break its cutting tools -- which are costly to replace. In that case, it's better to slow the machine slightly.
"I had guys coming up to me and saying: `Why are you telling that guy anything?' " Mr. Guikema says. He shrugged it off. "There are different groups, factions" inside the plant, he says, some more open than others to sharing knowledge. He's convinced the majority of workers are like him.
But Mr. Guikema is careful about sharing some things. Leading the way across the factory to a big blue wooden board, he points to a series of hooks, each holding a plastic sleeve containing an individual order.
The earliest orders are supposed to be filled first, regardless of the size of the parts involved. But constantly shifting from one size to another means making time-consuming adjustments to his machines. So Mr. Guikema mentally rearranges the cards into groups that require similar parts -- while being careful to avoid any obvious gaps or delays. If a manager catches him, he'll be reprimanded and told not to do that anymore.
Some workers, such as David Brunges, 46, worry about new technology robbing them of some of the benefits of their hard-earned knowledge. Standing next to a cream-colored machine the size of a small bus, Mr. Brunges punches a series of buttons on a computer keypad that dangles down the side. His task today is to figure out the best way to make anespecially complicated metal part. Cutting the part to shape inside the big machine requires nearly 30 different steps. He's gotten the programming procedure down to about two hours but figures he can do better.
"There were lots of tricks on the old machines," he says, such as the mechanical buttons that allowed him to vary the speed of different cutting functions.
Once, managers didn't keep track of that kind of fiddling, which allowed him to come up with his own private tricks for boosting output. But the new machines are computerized and every motion they make is recorded automatically. "So if I come up with a way to run something faster, if they want to know about it, they can," he says.