Wednesday, January 5, 2011

It's Basic Math

Have you ever given your Boss an OH CHIT moment? Well I had that opportunity today. And it all revolves around basic mathematics. Now, you need to know I am a machine operator, and he is Suppose to be the Boss. Today we were going over the Dusenberry (rewinder, paper machine) schedule. We have a hugeeeeeee order, 140,000 square meters, of material due out on Friday, 21st of January. We are scheduled to start running it on Monday the 17th. Just 4 days before. The truck needs to be loaded Friday, so that is not considered a production day.
The meltblown machine is scheduled to start producing the material on the 10th of January, it then has to cure roughly 72 hours, depending on the heat/humidity in the building. Then we cut it down to smaller rolls. So we won't have access to it until at the earliest, Friday the 14th.

Well I told the Boss today, there was no way, in that overheated southern region, we were going to be able to run 140k square meters of material in 4 days. He was like why not? I told him to grab his handy dandy calculator and figure out how long it took us to run the last order that was only 17k. It took just over 8 hours.

So, figure roughly 17k in an 8 hour shift.
140,000 / 17000 = 8.25 days (This is where his jaw dropped and he said, "brb.... oh how do you feel about working weekends?")
My normal days off are Fri-Sun. I work four 10 hour days.

Ummm ok, we now have doubled the time they had set aside to run this material. When you take into consideration 3 hours set up time, employee breaks and 64 hours straight running time, we need almost 70 hours to get this order out.We get the material Friday, even if we run said material for 8 hours Friday, Mon, Tues, Weds, and Thursday, we will NOT be done for the following Friday. NO CHIT . I kid you not, do the math.
5x8=40 (30 hours short)

So maybe we need to work 12 hour shifts, again do the math,
12x5= 60 (10 hours short, and already working one of my days off)

The only true, workable solution, is to work six 12 hour days, regardless of what they want, in order to get the order out on time. 2 of my 3 days off, 12 hours all the way through. Now, I won't lie, I love overtime pay, that is not my complaint here.

My complaint is Why The Friggin Heck did I need to tell them this??!!!

1 comment:

Bob G. said...

EL:
Wow, you did your homework on this one...perfectly executed...and your BOSS should already KNOW that.

Just remember, you don't have to be INTELLIGENT to be a boss...just have a good LOUD MOUTH!

Take it easy out there.
And have a great weekend.