Fishbone diagrams are a big help in manufacturing, I know. I was glad to see that we read about fishbone diagrams for class because that was one section I did not have to pay a whole lot of attention to because I am already familiar with it.
When I was a Co-op student in a manufacturing plant, we engineers would use the fishbone technique to find potential causes for miscellaneous things. For example, when our production line did not make the day's quota at the end of the day, it was necessary to find out why. I thought it was funny to see that Kaoru Ishikawa mentioned the "four M's" that problems boil down to because they were all true. Manpower, Materials, Methods, and Machines were all causes of our production line not meeting the daily quota! First, the manpower was never consistent. People would not show up for work, or show up late, or abuse their FMLA (Family & Medical Leave Act) rights, or just not work! Second, several materials were outsourced, so sometimes we would not get the shipment in on time, or the shipment had bad parts in it, or we ruined the materials ourselves. Third, the methods we used were typical industry standards, but they would fail sometimes too because of safety reasons and such. Last, machines would constantly fail. Electronics do fail. When machines go down, they could be down for 5 minutes (which seems insignificant, but cost us $8,000 per minute in sales) or be down for 6 hours (which REALLY got executives upset).
The bottom line is that the fishbone diagram helps to sort out and organize the possible causes for the problem. The fishbone diagram does not solve the problem because extra work is required after the causes are sought out to observe the causes and to implement the changes to make sure the problem "never happens again".
---DLM---When I was a Co-op student in a manufacturing plant, we engineers would use the fishbone technique to find potential causes for miscellaneous things. For example, when our production line did not make the day's quota at the end of the day, it was necessary to find out why. I thought it was funny to see that Kaoru Ishikawa mentioned the "four M's" that problems boil down to because they were all true. Manpower, Materials, Methods, and Machines were all causes of our production line not meeting the daily quota! First, the manpower was never consistent. People would not show up for work, or show up late, or abuse their FMLA (Family & Medical Leave Act) rights, or just not work! Second, several materials were outsourced, so sometimes we would not get the shipment in on time, or the shipment had bad parts in it, or we ruined the materials ourselves. Third, the methods we used were typical industry standards, but they would fail sometimes too because of safety reasons and such. Last, machines would constantly fail. Electronics do fail. When machines go down, they could be down for 5 minutes (which seems insignificant, but cost us $8,000 per minute in sales) or be down for 6 hours (which REALLY got executives upset).
The bottom line is that the fishbone diagram helps to sort out and organize the possible causes for the problem. The fishbone diagram does not solve the problem because extra work is required after the causes are sought out to observe the causes and to implement the changes to make sure the problem "never happens again".
Interesting! I didn't realize that Fishbone diagrams can be related to manufacturing. Thank for sharing this information. I'll be sure to share it with the next class I'm teaching. Thanks!
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