Pass the Word Along

Communications in any business is key to its success and efficiency. I work for a manufacturing company that produces electronic weather equipment such as thermometers, barometers, and rain gauges. Instructions on how to build these product are constantly changing as updates and modifications are made. Therefore, it is very important that the engineers communicate the changes to the production floor by updating the instructions. When an instruction is changed, it requires the approval of the engineer, the manager, and the production worker. This helps to ensure the information is understandable, accurate, and up-to-date.

There have been failures in communication when a set of instructions have been altered. During injection molding, a plastic mold is made to cover circuit boards. The instructions stated to simply place the product in the mold, and press "inject." However, when the worker followed the instructions, the circuit board broke inside the mold. Why did this happen? The engineer who wrote the instructions neglected to write how to put the circuit boards inside the mold. The worker had put the circuit board upside down within the mold. Although the engineer understood what needed to be done, he did not properly communicate it through the system.

The instructions needed to be complete in order to avoid failure. Other examples of failures in the instructions were too much information and data crammed into every page which time consuming to read. It was also impossible to find clear instructions on what needed to be done. Concise writing needs to be practiced. It saves people time and stress from reading meaningless data. Fortunately, since the instructions must be approved by engineer, the manager, and the production worker, miscommunication of instructions do not happen very often. But, all of these people must be on the look out for handling miscommunication errors. This requires asking each other if the information is up-to-date and correct.