If You Don't Have Time to Do It Right, You'd Better Have Time to Do It Over

People forget how fast you did a job - but they remember how well you did it.
--Howard Newton

Over the years, I've worked in a few factories. While all gave lip service to the idea of safety and quality first, their prime focus was always speed, which was motivated by greed. Every policy change was designed to increase production numbers and do so in a shorter amount of time than previously. Frequently such demands were accompanied by a reduction in personnel. In other words, they wanted fewer people to produce more in less time.

While there's no point in running a manfacturing plant if you're not going to make money, putting speed first has some major drawbacks. As I see it, safety should come first, then quality, and running a distant third should be speed.

When ever-increasing speed is the goal, especially with insufficent workers to reasonable meet the production goals, at some point, safety will go out the window. When plant supervisors say "faster", they don't mean "as fast as you can safely go"; they want it yesterday. I've seen people get their fingers chopped off, hands caught in machinery, etc, as workers get sloppy while trying to meet quotas, which, in many cases, means keeping their jobs.

No employer should expect any job to be done faster than can be done in a consistently safe manner. It goes without saying.

And to put speed in front of quality is short-sighted, to say the least. Quality should be the first consideration after safety. What's the point of doing it at all if it isn't done right. Producing a quality product gives a company a good reputation, thus increasing sales.

To put speed ahead of quality reminds me of two old sayings: "Haste Makes Waste" and "If You Don't Have Time to Do It Right, You'd Better Have Time to Do It Over". Not only does safety go out the window beyond a reasonable speed, so does quality. Not taking the time to pay close attention to how one is doing a job tends to generate a high percentage of defective product, which must be reworked, sometimes more than once, before it can be shipped to stores. This wastes money, which cancels out any benefits working faster might produce.

A focus on speed also is hard on machinery. In the push to produce more in less time often doesn't allow mechanics to properly maintain machinery, which results in frequent breakdowns, which is downtime when nothing is being produced. Naturally, after an extended period of downtime, supervisors want workers to go even faster to make up for lost time, which starts the vicious circle over again. Not incidentally, this also contributes to more overtime, which costs the company money.

One would think that the idea that operating at a moderate, steady speed, paying close attention to safety and quality will ultimately produce more, with less wear and tear on workers and machinery wouldn't be such a difficult concept for companies to discover.

Apparently, however, it is.

Thoughts?