DRIVING QUESTION
What is this operation telling me before anyone speaks?
The operation is already talking. Your job starts with whether you were listening before anyone spoke.
The Facility Walk: Read Before You Ask
- Manual processes first. How many people does each one take? That's where the labor cost concentrates and automation has the clearest case.
- Where people cluster, where product sits idle, where the floor is worn. A worn path is a vote. It shows you how the space is actually used.
- Existing automation. Running, or worked around? Clean, or wearing a hand-lettered out-of-order sign? The physical state tells you more than any interview.
- The powered-off machine. Ask its story before you propose anything. That story is the one thing a spec sheet can never give you.
- The building's constraints. The mezzanine edge, the forklift aisle that runs all shift, the near misses nobody put on a drawing.
- The personality. Will they maintain what you leave behind, or does it join the pile of things that got installed and abandoned?
THINK LIKE THE OPERATOR
You already learned to think like the package. Now add the person. Somewhere inside the system you design, at two in the morning on the worst night of the year, one associate is standing in front of a jam with a truck waiting at the dock. Can that one person clear it alone, or does your elegant design need two people and a call to a vendor who won't answer? Michael's one maintenance guy is who you're really designing for. If he can't keep it running, it doesn't matter how well it ran on paper.