Using videos to improve operations | Part 3 – Shooting shop floor videos

Following are a few recommendations on the art of taking shop floor videos:

1. Special requirements on shop floor videos. We have already seen that the requirements for shop floor videos differ from those of other uses of this technology. If you shoot a family or sports event, you will naturally want the highest resolution you can get, which would be counterproductive here. Likewise, shooting a video for the purpose of data collection is different from doing it for art or entertainment.For example, the Youtube video of a NASCAR pit stop looks somewhat like a shop floor video but isn’t one. It is entertaining and dramatically shot, but not usable for analysis. In fact, a shop floor video that captures everything that is needed for analysis is likely to bore anyone who is not directly involved with the target process.

   This needs to be considered when deciding who will be holding the camera. You will naturally prefer someone who is already handy with it, and that is likely to be from experience capturing family occasions, sports, or from making movies as an amateur. The ability to keep a camera steady and pay attention to lighting, composition and focus is valuable, but the camera operator will have to be coached on the specific objectives of shop floor videos.

2. Applications to setup time reduction or to the improvement of a work station. the camera needs to be looking down at the operator’s hands. In short operations, it can be done by holding the camera with a raised arm, and using the swiveling LCD screen for control. This gets tiring quickly and requires standing in such close proximity to the operator as to possibly interfere with his or her movements.
   Many plants have mezzanines or catwalks that provide a view from above. Being observed from such a place, however, may be uncomfortable for the operators, as well as too far to zoom in on the hands and capture any voice comments. The middle ground is to shoot from the top of a stepladder located within zooming and hearing range of the operator station, just far enough to avoid any kind of interference

   

   This works, until the operator leaves the station to walk beyond the reach of the zoom, at which point getting down off the stepladder to follow the operator while recording causes a few seconds of the action to be lots. A better solution is to hand over the camera to another team member on the ground, or even to involve more than one camera. In any case, this needs to be planned. Image stability is not an issue on the stepladder, but it is when following an operator’s movement across the floor, and you do not want a video that will make participants sea-sick during review. While professional tracking shots require equipment that is not available in a factory, some amateurs have supplemented the camera’s own image stabilization by shooting from a wheelchair.

3. Fixed position on a tripod for time-lapse videos. Setting the camera on a tripod in a fixed position is not appropriate for this kind of analysis, but is when taking time-lapse videos of a large area for purposes of work sampling.
4. Recording the position and orientation of the camera. It is also necessary to record on a layout of the shop floor the position and orientation from which the video is shot. The point is to return to the same location to shoot another video to document the improvements once implemented.
5. Number of repetitions. Traditional time studies involve taking measurements on the same operation 6 to 10 times, for the purpose of improving precision when setting standards of operator performance. But our purpose in recording operations is not to set standards but to change processes to make the work simultaneously easier, safer, less error-prone, and faster.
   All we need for this purpose is one representative execution, and the operator can tell us if there is anything special or abnormal about it. If possible, we just take it into account during the analysis; otherwise, we make another recording. To make sure we have one complete execution, we start recording a few seconds before the operation starts and stop a few seconds after it ends.
6. Scale. The presence of people in the videos gives us at least a rough sense of scale, but sometimes we would like more precision, for example to know how far an operator has to reach for a part, or how fast a cart is rolling. The following shots show the extreme measures the Gilbreths took for this purpose, with a gridded background. The picture also shows a large and precise timer, which was necessary because they used imprecise hand-cranked cameras.
7. No editing. We do not edit the shop floor video, except possibly to add a title and administrative data at the beginning, Otherwise, we use it in the analysis exactly as shot. It is raw data, and we want to keep it that way.