In today's challenging business world to improve any business, an organization must accomplish four things: generate tangible value; engage the entire organization at all levels; fundamentally change business processes, disciplines, and behaviors; and employ enabling technologies to cause and sustain these desired outcomes Companies attempting to "lean" their operations generally understand the degree of workforce engagement determines the speed of success. This was no different for two major US manufacturers, whose leaders looked for a way to accelerate their efforts. Both companies used outside resources working with internal teams and enabling technologies to implement proven process changes across the enterprise with the expectation the money spent would be returned in accelerated savings. The result was as expected, with a bonus – additional savings. One of the highlighted companies is a major US fresh bakery operation and the other is a candy manufacturer. The methodology used has been successfully implemented across a variety of verticals to include discrete, process and job shop manufacturing as well as airline maintenance and utilities. Instead of simply arriving on site and telling the plant team what will be changed based on a pre-defined solution, the engagements started with the plant and project team creating a picture of the current state value stream, using a combination of traditional "brown papers" and LeanView™ (powered by Microsoft Office Visio 2007). This early engagement of the plant teams not only ensured ownership in the solution, it provided deeper insight into where opportunity existed. Using technology in the waste identification process allowed the project team and the plant leadership to have a clear understanding of the dollar opportunity, ensure confidence in the priority of work defined in the project approach, and know which business processes must change in order to significantly impact performance. This phase occurred during the first 2 weeks of the team arriving on-site and was immediately followed by the implementation phase. Being able to move from analysis to implementation was critical to the success of both of these projects. Because the project team was able to digitize the system flows, link the entire enterprise value stream via a series of sub level maps, and then generate automatic analysis reports depicting traditional Lean metrics the analysis cycle time was significantly reduced. This in turn allowed the teams to maximize the momentum coming out of the highly collaborative, exciting phase into the much harder and challenging implementation phase. In addition, the easy to create "what if" analyses simulated and visually depicted proposed changes to help validate operational and financial impact of changes to performance and reduce most of the fear present during the change process. Put another way, making technology work in the waste identification process allows the project team and the client leadership to have a clear understanding of the dollar opportunity, ensure confidence in the priority of work defined in the project approach, and know which business processes must change in order to significantly impact enterprise performance, in days instead of months. The implementation phase required every manager/supervisor to change the way they interacted and responded to the shop floor team. Daily, sometime hourly review of performance and aggressive resolution of issues ensured the proposed changes occurred as defined by the project plan. The most difficult step is "making change stick". For these two companies the following principle was applied: Ensure the people affected by change are involved in defining the opportunity and designing the solution. As Socrates said, Tell me and I will forget…
Show me and I will remember…
Involve me and I will understand Ensuring people are involved, requires more than strategic platitudes about "employee involvement" sent down from the board room. It is imperative the organization use a variety of tools and methodology to base change on facts and business intelligence, made accessible to everyone in the organization. The business intelligence must be illustrated at the execution level of the organization allowing analysis at the product (SKU) level, shift to shift, line by line, with roll-up analysis at the end of every shift for each level of the organization. ERP systems provide the finance department and the business analysts insight into business data, but do not provide the necessary "execution level" data required to informed decisions on the shop floor. Nor do they clearly identify where "Best Practices" may be found. Effective execution level business intelligence will start with the establishment of meaningful data collection and analysis capabilities for the production lines supported by a technology application. It should accumulate (through manual and automated inputs) and interpret such raw data as downtime, line and labor efficiency, production, and scrap figures, which it then translates into actionable, real-time reports. Trends and patterns for line/area run issues, machine breakdowns and quality conditions, among others, are made available so timely responses can be made in the most cost-effective way. According to one plant manager, "[LINCS™]i helped manufacturing focus on the most critical problems we face in order to improve our performance…and we have seen significant contributions already. It's hard to imagine life without [LINCS™]." Additionally, the Vice President of Supply Chain, emphasizes the importance of people in converting improved business intelligence into results. "The main skill that was permanently transferred to our people is using factual data. Before this project, we were a lot of people with a lot of different opinions. Now it's much more black and white and we're much more analytical as a team. That's a big accomplishment. It's the implementation of long-term sustainable tools that will allow those people … to really contribute and see the value of their contributions show up in charts and at meetings and in the bottom line." All of these improvements translate to significant financial gain. At the conclusion of the implementation, the candy company calculated the return on investment at around $3 million annually. They recovered the initial investment in the first year and created a culture where continued improvement is highly probable. Next stepsi LINCS™, a business intelligence solution built on Microsoft technology
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