How to solve production / staff problems in a factory environment?

Almost sounds like a morale issue to me—I’ve found sometimes this happens if the folks on the floor feel like management is against them, and so they start to stop caring.

I would go less for stick (which would decrease morale further*) and more for carrot, especially if things are more “team” builds—e.g., a group of people take a product from beginning to ship. Offer a bonus (could even be relatively small—maybe 20 pounds) for each order shipped with no errors. If it’s the team doing it, they’ll start to watch out for each other more.

(* “the beatings will continue until morale improves”)

Also—my company (which is an architectural consulting firm) has a “policy” that no product goes out the door without a 2nd set of eyes looking at it. One person might take a project from start to finish, but someone else looks at it before it goes out—this stops a lot of dumb errors.

Do the staff have to meet a quota? It is possible that the quota to time available ratio is not equal to the complexity of the task.

Incentive programs work much better than punishment programs. Has your company looked into putting one of these in place? Often times people start making mistakes as a group because their co-worker gets away with it. Why should I produce less when my co-worker has less to worry about because they always meet their quota even though they make mistakes and I don’t. That type of attitude. So instead you start rewarding people who do focus on making the fewest mistakes.

That is a good idea grumpyfish, the 2nd set of eyes thing… but our product is too complicated for that. We have 4 main production areas working a bit like a production line, so one area will do a bunch of stuff, another area then takes that and does more stuff to it, etc.

The first area is mostly problem free, the second area is the most important as they do the most, and the most varied work to the product, the third area does only superficial things, and the fourth area finishes jobs off and ships them out.

In theory if the first area makes any mistakes, they should be picked up by the second area. Many mistakes made by the second area, and more so the third area, should be picked up by the fourth area. So there is some error checking/quality control inherent to our setup.

You have to be the one to systematize a TQM (total quality management ) program…... you have to involve the workers in this….. tools include Pareto analysis/diagrams , Fishbone analysis/diagrams…... If your problems are costing you £1000s per month the cost of performing this analysis with key workers from each step you described will be more than worth the effort….......

Docking wages will not improve performance.
If someone is causing you to lose money, find out who is making the mistakes, and work with them to correct it. If they cannot perform their job to the necessary requirements, you’ll have to let them go.

Docking pay will make people angry and your problem will continue or get even worse.
Collective punishment is not the way to encourage your employees to do better work.