Why Craftsmanship Is Still Pivotal in Industrial Manufacturing

Lean production is about more than just nuts and bolts – it’s the essence of value.

Standardization and lean principles are crucial to all types of manufacturing, not just industrial types. Handcrafted, artistic products and services are equally able to benefit from agile, connected processes.

Explaining Craftsmanship in Manufacturing

Take almost any industry and you’ll find a wide variety of products ranging in quality from cheap or disposable to artistic, one-of-a-kind pieces. It’s just not true that the cheaper you can offer something, the better. Craftsmanship in manufacturing can be an advantage for your product and should be enhanced throughout the manufacturing process.

The Value of Made-to-Order Products

Companies can grow their demand bases through reputation alone if they truly invest in their products’ longevity, quality, and value for their customers. This is true of many industries, from food to clothing, electronics, and tools.

People will pay top dollar for a product that truly lasts for a lifetime, so it’s beneficial to work value into every step of the process through standardization.

These are all ways of instilling value into each stage of the production process that will eventually be passed down to the customer at the end.

Lean Production and the Essence of Value

It’s important to invest in agile process improvements so that you can properly nurture craftsmanship in artisanal products for reliability and quality control from item to item.

And on the human side of the equation, there’s greater opportunity to invest in your workforce by training workers in different skills so that your production lines can be more versatile with changing job orders.

With a tool such as digital work instructions, workers can amass and share the knowledge necessary for the highest standard of product.

The Challenges and Opportunities of Scaling Handmade Production

Production featuring handmade products occupies a different manufacturing niche than product lines designed for mass production.

Nurturing Craftsmanship at Scale

Scaling up your operations works a little bit differently when you’re producing hand-crafted items. The greatest constraint is the specialty skilled human labor that is required to make your products, because a single worker can only work so fast.

Upscaling in artisanal plants will be slower, yes, but it will also be more sustainable and reliable over time. There’s less risk of having machinery or technology become obsolete, which will mean costly replacement and unexpected downtime. There’s also less money spent on machinery upkeep and maintenance.

The focus on quality in craftsmanship is sometimes in conflict with the ability to increase quantity. Since workers spend more time on each item than in a mass production context, it can seem like there’s not much you can do to speed things up. However, this focus on quality means you can charge more for your product, it will last longer, and scarcity will increase the value of the item.

Another advantage of handcrafted products is the ability to easily customize items to customer specifications. This is especially impactful since it often doesn’t require wasteful actions like shifting over equipment at different workstations to cater to customization requests.

Balancing Quantity with High-Quality Outputs

Here’s a great example of the necessary relationship between craft and technology: did you know that no machine on earth can replicate crochet? It’s true – industrial knitting machines exist, but the crochet stitch involves so many dimensional motions that it is currently impossible to scale on an industrial level. Every crocheted item that exists has been created by a human artist.

Yet there’s still a way for a crocheter to benefit from lean technologies while increasing quantity. They could benefit from software that adapts clothing patterns to different body sizes, for example, or estimate the amount of materials required to make an item from a different weight of yarn. They could hire more crocheters to work a line shift and quickly teach them how to duplicate product samples from video work instructions tailored to different skill levels in fiber arts.

Case Study: Gerber Gear’s Integration of Digital Work Instructions

One example of digital transformation for a manufacturer of hand-crafted products is Gerber Gear, which produces knives.

Specialized workers spend decades honing their craft, and the result is lasting quality that cannot be easily replicated by mechanical means. Along the way, they pick up unique techniques to help solve problems and troubleshoot difficult steps.

“When you deal with a hand-crafted item and you have a dozen people who are specialists in building it, they all are specialists in their own ways. They have all developed their own methods of providing our specialized products. This creates some quality challenges in the consistency of each produced item,” says Gerber Gear’s Process Improvement & Logistics Manager.

With VKS work instruction software, Gerber employees were able to adapt their skills to new product lines with ease. The ability for workers to switch stations and apply their knowledge was a massive step forward in capturing and standardizing tribal knowledge throughout the company.

Using Technology to Enhance Craftsmanship

Technologies like automation, AI, and VR are constantly hyped up in the manufacturing world; they represent the future possibilities of Industry 5.0 as it begins to raise new production standards.

As much as high tech is exciting, the human element is just as important. Machine and worker collaboration should be the goal of process improvements so that true innovations in product development and delivery can be achieved by industry leaders.

Of course, lowering operating costs is always going to be worth pursuing to some extent. Luckily, adopting digital technologies can work hand-in-hand with quality craftsmanship to lower costs at different stages of production.

In addition, digital forecasting tools like supply chain management and analytical forecasting can coordinate networks. Workers can have more consistent material quality and availability so that they can focus on the necessary jobs at hand.

Ultimately, optimizing workflows through digital means frees up time and effort for the human workers to focus on the artistic handiwork that goes into quality products.

Capturing and Transferring Tribal Knowledge

Knowledge transfer, also known as capturing tribal knowledge, is the most effective way to become a leading expert in your niche while preserving valued skills.

Gerber Gear’s office team developed many SOPs and work instructions drafts that were not followed exactly by the workers on the shop floor because they were inadequate just on paper. With VKS, instructions became dynamic, interactive, and visual, and served the purpose of standardizing quality from hand-crafted products.

For example, streamlining communication within work instructions and quality assessments means there is less confusion on the line that causes bottlenecks in processes.

With clearly documented work instructions and training materials, new trainees can be onboarded faster than ever, meaning a more stable labor pool with a diversified collection of skills.