Solving Process Problems from the Ground Up

Excerpted from an article by Lincoln Brunner, Editor of Tube & Pipe Journal, published in the October/November issue, based on an interview with Paul Vragel, President, 4aBetterBusiness, Inc.

Standing in a repair shipyard in Lisbon, Portugal in 1974, inspecting the shattered bottom end bearing of a 30,000-HP diesel engine, engineer Paul Vragel knew he had a problem – several, actually.

The hobbled engine powered a ship that was in Lisbon for its guarantee drydocking and inspection.  The ship, owned by Vragel’s multi-national oil company employer, and the engine both were built in Spain.  Vragel’s employer had a contract with the company that built the ship, but not with the one that built the engine – which was constructed under license from a Danish company.  The repair shipyard was charging the company $30,000 a day (about $250,000 in today’s dollars) to dock the ship there, adding to the urgency.

The then 23-year-old Vragel – sent to Lisbon as an “observer,” but with orders to fix the bearing problem – had no situational knowledge or budget to draw upon.  He also didn’t speak a lick of Portuguese.  Or Spanish.  Or Danish, for that matter.

“I’ve got nothing,” Vragel remembered thinking.  “I’ve got no domain expertise, no authority, no cooperation.  Flat.  Zero.  Except, I figured, “OK, I’m here.:  So, I said “I want to go and look at how they make the bearings.”

Look he did.  In a couple of days, he discovered the problem:  The manufacturing process produced porosity in the bearing material, and the bearing was failing under stress.  But Vragel knew, even at 23, that unless the people who cast the bearings recognized how their process connected to everything else in the chain of events that led to the breakage, nothing would get fixed.

Wisely, he decided simply to ask questions of the bearing makers, listen and then sketch out the process with pencil and paper. 

“Out of that, if they can see where this is going, then they can connect the things that they know to that [sketch],” Vragel said, the memory still so fresh that he talked about it in present tense.  “I look and listen and work with the employees.  In a couple weeks, we take what they’re doing, look at the process, and fix the process.  Now they can make perfectly acceptable bearings.

“That was very interesting,” he added.  “I’m 23 – no authority, no domain knowledge, no staff, no budget, cross-language, cross-culture, in a plant overseas that I have never seen before.  And in a few weeks of listening, we gat a permanent increase in their manufacturing capability – that they own.”

The engine got fixed, the ship went back into service, and Vragel earned his stripes doing nothing more than a willingness to observe, discern, and help the people doing the work connect the proper dots.

The Process is The Problem

Graduating from helpless to hero in Lisbon taught Vragel something: to see for himself how things get done – and more important, to listen to the people doing it.  It led him to two conclusions about manufacturing process management that he’s carried with him ever since:

Keeping these two principles in mind can help any company go right after the underlying processes of their business, and by enlisting their employees as part of the solution, get buy-in to change and solutions that work.

Paul Vragel Founded 4aBetterBusiness 25 years ago and has deep experience helping companies overcome operations and technology implemenation challenges, leading implementation of process, technology and cultural transformations in complex manufacturing businesses. BSc from Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, MBA, University of Chicago. Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt, ISO 9001 lead auditor.

Paul will be speaking during the Smart Manufacturing Bootcamp at FABTECH 2022.