🚀 Uncover Hidden Assumptions in Your Automation Roadmap: 3 Critical Audits!

[Süeda Asil]

Most automation roadmaps begin with the goal of making existing processes run faster. While this sounds logical, a new cell, robot, or layer of software risks cementing the assumptions upon which old processes were built—even those that haven’t been questioned in years.

I call these assumptions “orthodoxies”: The rules a facility follows because everyone has always done it that way. As I noted in my article “The Stagnation Killer,” “Most organizations can’t break orthodoxies because they can’t see them, for these beliefs operate at a subconscious level.” Automation makes this blind spot expensive, because once an assumption is baked into equipment and code, it becomes much harder to question.

Here are the three assumptions I see most often, and a short audit to conduct before a purchase order is issued:

1️⃣ Assumption: “We’re out of capacity, we need more machines.”​

When I led a transformation at a shopping cart manufacturer in 2018, sales had been stuck just under $50 million for three years. In the prior four years, the facility had added $8 million in automation but seen little in return. Management was preparing for a multi-million-dollar expansion, as reports showed the facility running at 72% capacity.

I spent the next week on the production floor doing manual time studies. Value-added production accounted for 31% of the time. Setup and changeover was 18%, waiting for material was 14%, and inspection and rework was 9%. The machines were busy, but most of that activity was producing nothing.

We canceled the expansion. In 18 months, revenue exceeded $60 million without an expansion.

• Audit question: Before automating, has anyone timed what the existing equipment is actually spending its hours doing?
  

2️⃣ Assumption: “Big batches are efficient.”​

There, each changeover took about 47 minutes, and the line ran six to eight times a day. To avoid these, everything was produced in large batches. This logic looked efficient on the cost sheet, but it created an average of 156 hours of queue time and $8.7 million in excess inventory. The lost changeover time cost about $180,000 a year. The batch production used to avoid it, however, cost an estimated $11.3 million a year.

By applying Shigeo Shingo’s SMED (single-minute exchange of die) method, changeover times dropped to 12 minutes. This allowed batches to drop from 50 units to 10, queue time to fall from 156 hours to 34, and $5.6 million to be wrung out of inventory.

Had that facility sized new automation around 50-unit batches, it would have cemented the problem.

• Audit question: Is the batch size you’re planning a customer requirement, or a workaround for slow changeovers?
  

3️⃣ Assumption: “More inspection means more quality.”​

When we cleared the facility’s main assembly bottleneck, the constraint shifted to final quality control. The reflex answer was more inspectors, or in many roadmaps, an automated inspection station. We asked a different question: Why did so much need to be caught?

Root cause analysis showed that 78% of what final inspection caught originated upstream. We fixed those sources, moved controls earlier, and reduced final inspection to sample checks. Defects dropped 52%, and inspection time dropped 67%.

Automating the inspection of defects you could prevent is paying money to sort scrap faster.

• Audit question: For each inspection point in the roadmap, how much of the defects it finds originate upstream?
  

🔍 How to Conduct the Audit​

This audit doesn’t require special software. Take each assumption behind the project and ask four historical questions: When did this start? What was it done to fix? Is that problem still here? What happens if we stop doing it? Then push the answers with a Five Whys chain until you reach the answer “because that’s how it’s always been done.”

Include people from outside your industry. At a strategy session at an appliance business, we invited three outsiders. One, a logistics manager, asked why we produced to forecast instead of to orders. Insiders rarely ask such questions, because the practice comes naturally.

Finally, sequence the money. At the cart facility, the standard answer to the main bottleneck was an $800,000 second assembly station. We first reorganized the station, staged material at the point of use, and synchronized upstream batches to its pace, all without capital expenditure. Only then did we add $87,000 in automated fastening. The throughput at that station reached 142% of the original. Following Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, automation came last and was small.

Every capital request should pass through a real gate. As I note in my upcoming book, “The 10-Minute Turnaround,” “A construction gate that rejects nothing is not a gate.”

Automation multiplies whatever process you feed it. Audit the assumptions first, and you’ll automate the right work.

 

[spad]

Effective automation starts with challenging the process—not simply making existing operations faster. Identifying hidden inefficiencies in machine utilization, batch sizes, changeovers, and quality control can deliver greater results before investing in new equipment.
Spad Electronic develops and integrates electronic, embedded, control, and industrial automation solutions, with a focus on building reliable systems around real production needs and measurable operational improvements.

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