Detailers Are Production Workers

Status makes the world go round. Will Storr’s book The Status Game talks all about status and how it’s one of the biggest subconscious drivers in human existence. Status made me want to be a detailer. From the shed, it seemed like a pretty flash job, very high status. You get to sit in the office, talk to builders, drink coffees, tap away on the keyboard, then go home!

Maybe, if I was smart, I would have asked the detailers what it's actually like, but then I wouldn't be here writing this article. How could I deprive you of such beautiful prose? Anyway, Status made me want to be a detailer, but what kept me engaged was talking to the factory staff, walking through the shed, and creating a tight feedback loop between the decisions I made in the office, and the manufacturability of every job I sent out. A disconnected workforce can cost frame and truss manufacturer’s production points and lineal metres every day, and it's becoming increasingly common.

Detailers are losing their collective connection to the shed because the role gets misrepresented. You can see it in detailing roles being advertised online. The emphasis is placed on collaborating with external stakeholders to produce a buildable and compliant job, and that's definitely a crucial part of the job. But there’s only a token recognition of the fact that detailers have to support efficient manufacturing with their designs.

Detailers all too often get classified as technical back office staff. In reality, they are key parts of the production line. Every single job that gets manufactured makes its way across the detailers desk. Aligning the role with how this affects the bottom line, is key to operating a profitable business. Success in on site buildability and engineering compliance is only half the picture.

Let's look at how a lot of businesses measure good detailers.

Every single one of these success metrics is important to the business, and the detailer. Work needs to be completed accurately, in a timely fashion, with on site buildability in mind. Achieving these goals will ensure customer satisfaction, and build relationships with all external stakeholders. What they won’t do is indicate to the detailer how efficient the design was for the factory to build, or how much downtime the press had due to unclear design choices.

We have talked previously here about how the production line starts a long way further up the chain than the first operation in the factory. In summary, no production happens downstream unless the detailer has done his or her job. The saw starves when the detailers don't produce. This implies that like every other step in the production line, detailing needs to be subordinated to the constraint, or the bottleneck. In a truss operation, it is the pressing station. 

Detailing with the above metrics in mind is what I would call ‘Technically Correct’ detailing. It is a job that gets built in the factory, sent to site, erected, passed by the building surveyor, and the rest of the house built around it with no real on site hiccups. Great job done, by the current indicators of a successful job. 

What if the job took longer to manufacture than was expected? What if it took longer than even the prescribed production points indicated? What if the press sat dormant for 20 minutes while the operators were figuring out a missing bit of information that the detailer knew in their head or was tucked neatly away in the emails about the job? Rework, missing paperwork, botched exports, unnecessary change in setups. bad for the business, but not easily measured.

So many things that the detailer has control over, can influence how well or how poorly a job works within the confines of the facility. All of this gets missed in the post mortem of a job. It all falls through the cracks of any one person's set of prescribed responsibilities.

Detailing a job successfully is not wholly and solely making sure it's ‘technically correct’. The type of detailing I think is well done, is ‘Production Ready’ detailing. Design for Manufacture is what most people call it, and that's exactly what it is. Designing your wall frames and roof trusses explicitly with how easily they can be manufactured in mind. 

What makes a frame and truss job easily manufactured? Design that is friendly to the machinery available, design that is totally transparent to factory staff, so they don't have to guess or ask questions to the detailer. 

Manufacturable design is design that considers the tools available to the factory and uses them effectively. Do you have a jig with a gantry press that makes your main trusses? Make sure you have to move the boxes as little as possible. Do you have a frame line that has a short outfeed table? Stack your frames so that it is a mix of straight walls with no openings, and walls with lots of openings. Each end of the frame line can catch up with each other.

A tight feedback loop matters, and the rise of remote detailing is making the feedback loop between the factory and the design team harder and harder to keep tight. The quicker someone knows they have to change something, the quicker something gets changed. If a remote detailer only gets down to the factory once every 6 months without any other communication between, then changes get made on a 6 monthly time scale. When a detailer walks the factory and talks to the workers every couple of days, changes and improvements happen all the time.

Those improvements compound. And the lack of them compounds in the other direction. I’m not arguing against remote work, but just that we need to be mindful that when the feedback loop breaks, the factory bears the cost.

Lets say I have a team of remote detailers. They don’t get a lot of feedback from the shed because there are too many degrees of separation between them and the factory workers. The detailer favors a way of designing that works well in a factory they are familiar with, like stacking frames for two frame lines when there is only one available. The factory workers get more and more fed up with this way of detailing and blame the detailer for the drop in production. The detailer hears this and doubles down on the wrong process. The relationship has soured, and now one part of the production line is sabotaging another part of the production line. Tight feedback loops and relationships matter.

So what are some ways to measure manufacturable, production ready detailing? Try and track press downtime, and the reasons behind it. If detailing is technically correct and not production ready, you will see down time that happened because factory workers needed to ask the detailer clarifying questions. Track rework that happened due to detailing errors that were picked up during manufacture, instead of on site. Compare and scrutinise the amount of setups different jobs need, and work on minimising those setup changes.

Tracking these metrics is only worth something when a factory fosters a tight feedback loop. Look at the work a factory is currently producing, and identify what holds up the press and the frame line, look at what confuses the operators, and what they need to talk to the detailer about (or even worse - take a guess on). Start optimising detailing to suit the factory it is going into. Get on site detailers into the factory for walk throughs, open up some dialogue between them. For remote detailers, get a direct line of communication between them and the factory staff opened up. Have regular meetings and try to get the remote detailers to site as often as possible. Building relationships inside the business is just as important as building relationships outside of the business.

Detailers embedded in the production line, shoulder to shoulder with the factory. Manufacturers that build this relationship build more. It’s that simple.

Thanks for reading Offcut. As always, if I’m talking shit, let me know! if you think there’s a grain of truth to it, send it to someone else!