Is the production meeting a relic of the past?

Who has time for meetings?

I got answers to that question over the past couple of weeks as I was working on a story for the January 2015 issue of The FABRICATOR. The original idea for the story was to find out what fabricators think make up the ideal production meeting. What I discovered is that time is a very valuable commodity, so the idea of a daily production meeting is not as prevalent as I thought. In fact, one small fabricator doesn’t hold any sort of meeting; they communicate on-the-fly and immediately focus on the hot issues as they come up.

I actually heard back from Jason Dugle, president, Deltec Inc., a Batavia, Ohio-based job shop, just recently after I had reached out to talk to him for the feature a couple of weeks ago. He would have contacted me sooner, but his shop has been very busy. Sound familiar?

His shop does hold a daily meeting of lead personnel from different segments of the business. Dugle said he thinks such a meeting provides the opportunity for everyone to discuss any important issues and focus on any key performance indicators that may be trending in the wrong direction. He said the meeting should be helpful, fresh, and avoid hogging people’s precious time.

“If the meeting is over, get out of there. Adjourned!” he wrote in his e-mail.

Dugle’s comments and those from other shops interviewed for the story reflect the lean manufacturing environments that metal fabricators find themselves in. People are doing more with less, especially when compared to the previous generation of manufacturing workers, and lead times are as short as they have ever been. Time is of the essence, and no customer is paying for people to sit around a conference table and talk about next Friday’s barbecue or the upcoming company Christmas card photo. Those customers are paying for the steps and expertise in creating a metal part or assembly out of sheet metal—value-added activities, as accountants like to call it.

This type of efficiency can be maintained in small manufacturing organizations, where front-office workers are likely to be only a few feet away from the shop floor, and in larger fabricating operations, where management and key personnel have grown with the company and are walking embodiments of what made the company successful from the start. But those fabricating shops that are growing rapidly are at great risk of losing the can-do culture that makes the most successful businesses successful. New employees—especially if they feel disengaged from company management and goals—may more frequently put their own needs before those of the company’s customers. That’s when more meetings are a necessity.

Production meetings aren’t a relic of the past. They still can be useful, but each metal fabricator will adapt these meetings as they see fit—not as the past has dictated.