Tag: focused factory

Tools for Managing the Tail

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Managers and analysts who develop and improve products, systems and processes increasingly manage activities in the tail of near-perfect delivery expectations and stunning complexity.  In addition to understanding the finance and quality contexts of their functions, they can manage the tail by simplifying processes and problems, reducing goals and options, optimizing within constraints and monitoring non-critical activities.

Simplify Processes and Problems

  1. Modularize components to reduce the number of processes, flows and points of failure.  Reduce the points of contact between modules.
  2. Incorporate self-testing features to make component outputs fail-safe (poke yoke).
  3. Use a greater common denominator approach to combine options and provide just the higher value option.
  4. Separate A, B, C and D volume/variability items into focused factory, modular production, job shop and true custom flows.  Move D volume processes completely out of the system if required.
  5. Side-track complex evaluation steps to allow human expert consideration.
  6. Require incompatible orders or requests to be split and handled separately.
  7. Design processes to allow them to start again or reboot to eliminate truly random circumstances or operator error.

 

Reduce Goals and Options

  1. Set a short-term level of imperceptible defects or same level as the competition.  Use this to guide short-run choices.
  2. Reduce the number of customer goals from a dozen to six or two or one.  As demonstrated in Eli Goldratt’s book “The Goal”, this can simplify and motivate for long-run improvements.
  3. Use marketing research and Pareto analysis to determine the limits of perceptible differences and material goals.
  4. Incentivize customers to accept achievable goals and options by offering discounts, features, benefits and service.
  5. Leverage IT, technical, safety and regulatory limits to reduce options.

 

Optimize Within Constraints

  1. Set a project scope and resource budget.  Rank order initiatives and deliver within the time allowed.
  2. Simulate processes to determine the probability of occurrence and use this to eliminate low-frequency events from analysis.
  3. Apply best diagnosis practices for intermittent failures.  Set time limits.  Escalate to world-class experts. Set time and dollar limits.
  4. Limit the complexity of the system to a one-page flow-chart.

 

Monitor Non-Critical Activities

  1. Document future improvement options in a project parking lot.
  2. Develop reports and processes to monitor known risk and problem areas to identify root causes or increased frequency of occurrence.

 

There are many other approaches used by experienced product developers, project managers and analysts.  The insights of each functional area can often be used in other functions.

Ch Ch Ch Changes

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The Baby Boomers may have digested more workplace changes (1970-2010) than any prior generation, moving from an industrial to a post-industrial, services, or virtual world.  The post-Civil War generation saw the initial transition from an agricultural to an industrial society (1880-1920).  Their grandchildren saw the full flowering of the industrial world, with incredible advances in manufacturing, transportation and communications (1920-1960). 

Nearly every usual business practice or function in 1970 has been superseded or turned upside down in the last 4 decades.

The office world of 1970 looked much like 1920.  It was hierarchical, manual and rigid.  Secretaries assisted managers.  Typing, filing, shorthand and bookkeeping were essential skills.  Today, only a few senior execs or sales staff members have administrative or executive assistants.  Everyone else completes their own clerical functions as an integral part of work.  Paper ledger forms and 10-key adding machines have been replaced by Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in even the smallest firms.  QuickBooks offers capabilities that were unimaginable in 1970.

Mainframe computers automated high volume transaction and office tasks in large firms in 1970.  Computers have since expanded to touch every function, moving through minicomputer, PC, network and cloud phases.  Sophisticated applications exist today for every function and industry, including a dozen end-user tools such as spreadsheets, databases, word processing and collaboration/time/task management.

Communications has progressed from rotary phones, party lines and PBX systems to WiFi, VOIP systems, wireless phones and personal digital assistants.  Media has progressed from AM transistor radios through 8-track and VHS tapes to disks, digital downloads, massively multiplayer games and social media entities.

Companies today pursue core competencies, partnerships and virtual structures in contrast with the old vertically integrated ideal or financial portfolios of conglomerates.  Firms are financed through a broad range of instruments and investors throughout their lives rather than with simple stocks, bonds and preferred stocks.

Companies today compete globally and engage in partnerships with suppliers, customers and competitors.  They also compete with suppliers, customers and competitors, including small entrepreneurial start-ups.

Support functions are more important today.  The Personnel function has become Human Resources.  Marketing has assumed a strategically important role in product development and sales management.  Finance is a strategic partner in decisions.  Many functions are outsourced.

Product development is managed through a gates and phases process.

Operations functions have been totally transformed.  Quality has evolved from a technical necessity to an organizing principle.  Processes shape decisions.  Variability and waste are shunned.  The near-perfection of Six Sigma is pursued and achieved.  Firms benchmark and copy best practices.  Forecast based push systems have been replaced with JIT pull systems, reducing inventories to zero and lot sizes to units of one.  Mass production has been replaced by a network of focused factories, modular manufacturing and outsourcing.

Strategic planning has migrated from an infrequent fully integrated top-down approach to an iterative  process that massages top-down and bottom-up factors within a balanced scorecard composed of assets, operations, stakeholders and final goals. 

Suppliers are managed as long-term partners, instead of short-term contractors.  Staff members are treated as partners, even though company and staff initiated turnover is much higher.  Simplistic theory X and Y approaches (employees are good or bad) have evolved into situational leadership type approaches that match task/people dimensions to current needs. 

These generic changes have occurred seen in every industry and function, layered on top of the major technical and professional progress seen in each area. We are rapidly approaching a time when virtual organizations are a reality because they are more effective than forms suited to an industrial era.  Baby Boomers have experienced this whole cycle of change and are well situated to mange the final transitions.