Chocolate Bars Made in a Factory
Chocolate bars made in a factory are, who would have thought, made in a factory! Not uniquely, artfully, and spontaneously created by a skilled chocolatier to your custom specifications, but made by a hundred or more machines sitting in a warehouse. As we analyze the chocolate factory, contrast it to how a chocolatier perform similar steps by hand instead of using machines, and what impact that may have on the end product.
Think, for example, of a Snickers bar.
Have you ever noticed that these chocolate bars are always produced exactly the same, even after decades? Same weight, same taste, same packaging, same look, and same odor. The packaging can be opened by a two year old (is that accidental?), it has a long shelf live, and resists a rather wide temperature range without losing its main qualities. It’s easy to hold even when you are driving or working, it’s rather filling, it doesn’t leave strong odors in your mouth after you eat it (well, sort of), and for an adult it’s the right portion size. It’s not too small and not too big in size (not in sugar content, however). You will find that most children will readily want to eat one even if not hungry, i.e. it has several addictive produced ingredients that are engineered to ‘hit the spot’ quickly. After eating it you get an enormous sugar boost, unless, of course, you are already a junk food addict, in which case you have to eat it several times daily in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms. (^_^) All these product characteristics were carefully engineered.
Hence, not only the product is the same, but the food experience for the user is the same over time. The consumption is typically repeated, not a once-off transaction. Understanding that food experience must be consistent and being able to deliver such a consistent experience is what made McDonald’s the mother of all franchises.
Can you make your own Snickers, one that is exactly like one from the store? Of course not. Why exactly not?
Could you convince the Snickers makers to significantly modify their product just because you wanted it, for example, to add a piece of broccoli in the middle of your Snickers? I bet not, even if you were really rich and willing to send them all your money, they won’t be able to do it as their setup is not meant to allow for customization.
A typical Snickers factory probably produces thousands of pieces per minute, all exactly the same, day in day out. How exactly is that done? How are costs being reduced over time without affecting the quality of the product? How can product counts be increased without increasing costs and without affecting the product quality?
High production throughput and consistent quality in the food business is usually achieved through automation and continuous, careful analysis. Food production lines, similar to the assembly lines in metal industries, carry various ingredients and prepared product components step by step through dozens if not hundreds of manufacturing steps.
Each of these steps, such as preparing peanuts, can be subdivided into more steps. Each step has the power of breaking the entire production chain. Hence, whatever leaves each step must be checked carefully. As the materials move from one step to another, and certain paths are consolidated, incoming materials, their quantities and qualities must also be checked. You can’t have the chocolate mixture too hot or too cold, or too much or too little of it, not too sweet, not too bitter, etc. There are a certain number of peanut halves on the Snickers, each fitting into a specific size and weight window. The consistency of the caramel filling is also dependent on various ingredients and so forth. When the time comes to apply the caramel filling, that particular production step process has to receive specific input materials (caramel mixture, peanuts, etc) to function properly. After the machine applies the caramel topping, it needs to make sure it doesn’t apply too much or too little, and the product has to remain in a certain temperature range while all of this is done.
The factory is a collection of hundreds of tiny production steps. Some are placed in sequence, some sequences run in parallel independently for a while until they are merged later into another production branch. Each step receives materials and emits materials that were worked on. Each step takes a certain amount of time and has to stick to a certain time window for the entire process to work smoothly. The materials entering and leaving must be very tightly matching the specification. A group of people had to think long and hard to set up the entire factory, each individual step, to buy and build the machines that perform these steps, to define the input and outputs, to define the permitted variations of inputs and outputs. But setting things up was just the beginning.
Since each production step receives inputs, measures them, processes them, and measures the output, there will be a mountain of data within a few hours. The data collected needs to be analyzed, perhaps charted in minimums and maximums, trends, distributions, etc. With this data in hand, the factory operators can spot the areas that produce too much waste, or take too much time to complete. In order to make Snickers production cheaper, faster, and more effective, the output of each step has to be clearly defined in measurable variables. Obviously the taste, odor, stiffness, and other characteristics of the end product are all evaluated as much as the output of various chocolate fountains used in the production line.
To summarize: the factory operators had to break down the entire manufacturing process into small steps. Then define the inputs, outputs, and actual process taking place at each ‘product station’ as precisely as possible. Once all the production steps are chained up and working, the operators need to monitor the process by taking automated and manual records of absolutely everything that matters: temperature, quality, quantity, weight, etc., of each item moving on the belts. Each machine is evaluated. How long does it perform without requiring maintenance, what kind of maintenance does it need? Should we reduce the chocolate temperature or increase it? Does it have an effect on the taste, odor, or texture of the end product? All these variables need to be investigated until we know by trial-and-succeed what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly, why something works or doesn’t.
Every now and then, some clever analyst comes along and realizes, hey this is way more complex than it should be. She comes up with a different plan that eliminates perhaps an entire leg of the manufacturing process. Perhaps because now new technology is available or perhaps certain materials make certain new production methods more feasible. By digging where no one dug before, she found lots of opportunities to improve the process. By looking at measurements and seeing trends no one paid attention to, or only few people in the factory understood, she found lots of areas that needed a major overhaul.
The entire factory and its internal processes are therefore not really ‘set in stone’ forever, even if it appears to be from a distance. They may be fixed for a while but not forever. In a quality system, we don’t just check the outputs and expect them to be consistent (quality control), we also want to find the root of the problem and continuously improve the manufacturing process.
But there is much more to be improved over time. Unlike the Snickers bar, other products improve dramatically over time. Improvements or changes occur because of many different factors. Customers might get tired of the same thing and demand something different. Surprisingly Snickers didn’t suffer from that problem. Ingredient quality might change over time. Certain ingredients might become more expensive, so they are removed and replaced by something else, and that can improve or worsen the end product quality.
A true quality system will go far beyond the production site and figure out ways to better understand what a customer really needs, how to minimize the impact on the environment, how to work better with suppliers and distributors, it will think about what other products it could offer in the future, how to protect its workforce better from danger, and not just improve profits for its owners in the short term.