If you’re making all of your own product, you probably work from an informal set of notes on paper or on a tablet/laptop/smart phone. Or maybe you just remember how to make your products and don’t rely on written instructions at all!
But once you start having employees or contractors make your products, you’re going to need….
Work Instructions
Work instructions are basically what they sound like: written-out instructions for how to make a manufactured product. Well-written work instructions help with many things in a manufacturing process, but in Zattatat’s opinion, consistent product quality, improved yield, and consistent following of safe manufacturing practices are the top three.
Princess Capybara didn’t know about work instructions at first…
If you’re a regular here at Zattatat, you know that Princess Capybara is a serial entrepreneur. She started with a biotech startup, but her latest venture is more of a lifestyle business. Specifically, she makes molded items out of concrete. Her best-seller is the Secret Wine Glass.
Anyway, Princess initially made all of the concrete products herself in her garage, and then hired a neighborhood teenager to act as her assistant. He would do things like cut the the rubber tubing for the drinking hose to the correct length or clean the molds for the Secret Wine Glass between uses.
As time went on, gradually it made sense to transfer more and more of the production to her initial employee (now a young adult) and to hire a few more part-timers to work under him so that Princess could focus more of her time on other aspects of running the business.
But, she started noticing that the employees didn’t always produce Secret Wine Glasses that were as good as hers. There were some that she felt she had to offer at a discount because they didn’t come out quite right, and a fair number that weren’t even suitable to be sold at all and had to be scrapped.
Her initial instinct was to blame her employees
She fired up her laptop and wrote an angry email to everyone, telling them to get their act together.
Luckily, before hitting “send,” Princess decided to take a long walk in the rain.
And Princess Capybara realized that the problem wasn’t really her employees. She had offered decent wages and good working conditions and been very careful in her hiring process, so she’d gotten good workers. They always showed up ready to do whatever she wanted them to do.
The problem was… she hadn’t been clear on what she wanted them to do.
In other words. the instructions she’d given to her employees weren’t clear.
So Princess Capybara asked Process Cat for some advice on work instructions
Process Cat reviewed Princess Capybara’s current work instructions and gave some suggestions for improvement:
- Include photos! The current instructions featured only verbal descriptions, which is completely unnecessary in modern times. Pictures can really help clarify the correct way to do hands-on tasks.
- Fix typos and other errors. Yes, it sounds a little silly, but a sloppy attitude to writing work instructions results in … sloppy manufacturing practices. More precisely, typos and other errors can require the reader to guess what they’re supposed to do and they don’t always guess correctly. Messy instructions can also just be frustrating for the employees – as an analogy, think of any badly-translated furniture assembly instructions you’ve encountered.
- Field-test the instructions. Meaning, have a few operators execute the process from the written instructions while you watch. This is a great way to catch any areas where your instructions weren’t as clear as you thought they were.
After hearing this advice, Princess Capybara deleted that nasty email draft and instead implemented Process Cat’s suggestions for improving her work instructions.
Weekly Challenge:
Do you have employees, contractors, or others making things in your business? If so, look through your work instructions and see if there are any areas where they could be improved.
