Tips for Better Manufacturing: Simplify : Efficiency: Consultant Leroy D. Peterson is a trouble-shooter for factories that want to be more competitive.

NEW YORK —  Whenever he sees a fleet of forklift trucks taking parts on a spaghetti-like tour of a factory, he sees a company in competitive trouble, Leroy D. Peterson says.

He sees lots of “spaghetti,” and because he does, he also sees hours of wasted time and activity that could be endangering quality and reducing competitiveness.

Peterson’s is a trained eye. Workers and managers on the scene every day might never see what they are doing wrong, but Peterson, head of the manufacturing practice of Andersen Consulting, will spot it immediately. Complexity offends his eye; operational simplicity pleases it.

In his role at Andersen, he has designed and implemented new-plant projects for European, North American and Japanese manufacturers seeking a competitive edge.

Excessive product movement is a sure sign of trouble, he says: “Materials handling adds costs and jeopardizes quality, and it contributes nothing to end-product quality.”

Most companies, he says, need to step back and rethink the way they do business. They must, in a sense, reinvent their businesses, and one of Peterson’s first decrees is this: “If it moves, simplify it.”

Problems originate early in product design, he says. “The first thing you have to do is cut the number of parts in a product, making it easier to produce.” Then, he continues, slash the number of steps in production. After that, simplify the factory tools so that they can be changed quickly to produce different items.

These and similar bits of advice for simplifying and saving time are included in the book, “Reinventing the Factory,” which Peterson wrote with consultant Roy L. Harmon.

One of the first questions Peterson asks is: ‘How long do you take to make and deliver a product to a customer--weeks and months? Or hours and days?’

Efficient producers streamline their enterprises, eliminating any activity that contributes little to the goal but adds time and cost.

Another thing he considers is the amount of space devoted to storage. A factory with more than half its space devoted to aisles and storage rather than production equipment suggests excessive operating costs and problems with inventory and product movement.

Another clue to an inefficient enterprise, he says, is a large amount of scrap and reworked things around the plant. “Competitive winners don’t pass on quality problems: they catch errors at the sources, eliminating re-machining of bad parts.”

Another sign of trouble is having groupings of similar machines-- lathes with lathes, punch presses with punch presses. Such groupings are traditional, Peterson says, but the cellular approach is more efficient. By that method, machines are arranged in the that order they are used in production, he suggests, cutting material movement and storage and giving workers a sense of how they contribute to the total effort.

Some other of his observations:

* “Absentee management is a compelling sign of a non-competitive environment. There’s no substitute for management walking the factory floor, getting a true feeling for the organization’s pulse or lack of one.”

* “If production workers are not meeting regularly with customers, they’ll never understand why it is so important to be able to change quickly, to customize, offer more options, and guarantee quality and delivery.”

* The reinvented factory need not depend on new technology. Most quality problems are not the workers’ fault, and they may be the fault of management.

“Virtually all quality problems can be eliminated with better design, better production flow, equipment and tooling that reject defective units and, most importantly, a management team resolved to doing things right the first time.”