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The act of measurement aloneAugust 7, 2008I am heading down to Washington for the NAPL Management Institute and thinking about some of the strange things about workflow improvement efforts. Without going into detail there is a very strange thing that occurs just because you start to look at something closely using measurements. The act of measurement, itself, impacts the results of the measurement. Just as dipping a thermometer into a vial of liquid can affect the temperature of the liquid being measured, the act of collecting data, where none was collected before creates a situation that didn't exist before, thereby affecting the results. For us in the graphic arts there is this more obvious then in prepress department and the press room. All you have to do is chart waste or spoilage, put this chart in a production area and people will start to ask about it and become motivated to see the line go down (decrease waste or spoilage). Simply creating charts and posting them in the production areas showing a measure such as number of errors or dollar value of errors will motivate the staff to reduce the mistakes. Posted by Howie Fenton on August 7, 2008 | Comments (2)               
August 7, 2008
In response to: The act of measurement alone Erik Nikkkanen commented: For sure, posting data will help improve performance but it only helps up to a point. Beyond that point, real changes are required. ....................The subject of measurement, data collection and statistical analysis in the printing industry is in my opinion not understood properly and the outcome has been generations of printers and suppliers that have not advanced the art in a progressive direction. ................The statement commonly used "
August 7, 2008
In response to: The act of measurement alone Erik Nikkanen commented: For sure, posting data will help improve performance but it only helps up to a point. Beyond that point, real changes are required. ....................The subject of measurement, data collection and statistical analysis in the printing industry is in my opinion not understood properly and the outcome has been generations of printers and suppliers that have not advanced the art in a progressive direction. ................The statement commonly used "One can not control what one does not measure" is misleading, faulty and has kept printers locked in the past. .................The goal of process control is to not have to measure. The aim is to have a process that is by design, inherently consistent and predictable. Measurements for calibration is proper but the idea of continual measurement to control the process is not. It is a form of continuous inspection, something which Deming was very much against but is the corner stone of process control in the printing industry. ................Also the use of statistical tools where tolerances and standard deviation are used, is done backwards in the printing industry. Tolerance limits are set more by historical variability of the process than by any analysis of how much variation is allowed to avoid visual variation. When done properly, where tolerance values are based on a noticeable visual difference, the tolerance limits are much smaller than what the industry thinks is correct. This leads to the problem that the offset process as is now, is not statistically capable of maintaining visual consistency. .................The lack of a proper view of the statistical requirements of the process has resulted in the industry not being interested in resolving the fundamental causes of variation. Only the symptoms of the problems are addressed through the cultural philosophy of "measure to control".
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