Information Supply Chain Excellence

We all see the effects of good and bad quality.  Whether we are in the hardware product flow or the information product flow, the level of quality of the inputs to our part of the process can impact how effectively we can perform our value-added tasks.  Occasionally we see glimpses of good quality inputs and can go straight to performing the work to change the product closer to what the customer is paying for.  Other times we have to rebuild everything to get what we need, thus delaying delivery and leaving the customer with a desire to find another supplier.  This "rebuild" requires labor and material beyond what is calculated in the base price.  The more "rebuild" you perform, the more your variable costs increase (hint, hint... the faster you will go out of business).

Looks like one person knows what I'm talking about....

Process Automation - Control or Inform?

Half the fun of improving processes is coming up with new or better ways to do stuff. One of our biggest opportunities is how we transfer information. This would be moving original documents, reviewing documents, and storing documents.

Information Workflow

When Good Ideas Go Bad

In my experience, groupthink is a behavior that can sink an improvement project if not caught and stopped early. Groupthink is where there is group pressure to ‘go along’ with the decisions of the group or the beliefs of the group. This can start with ill-defined problem statements, scope, and/or goals, and the team will stay on the wrong path if assumptions are not tested or questioned. Keeping charter information simple and validating the problem statement can go a long way control groupthink. Validation is accomplished through using process timelines or data that is reflective of the problem statement.

Another method to reduce groupthink is to use a balanced functionally diverse team. Members bring their own perspective of the problems and causes to the team and if functional diversity is not present, then the natural group will have the numbers to force their perspective on the other team members. Using balanced teams with one or two members from each function can prevent groupthink.

ummm, no.

My favorite cause of groupthink is when one "expert on everything" arrives and begins to tell everyone how to think. Many will go along to get along because they are afraid of making someone mad or they do not want to be seen as a non-team player or because they are introverts that are uncomfortable speaking up. As a project lead my first method is to take them off to the side and tell them to knock it off. If it continues I have called them out in front of the team, which usually sends them into the stratosphere. If I still do not see the behavior I am looking for I will send them back to their work group and let the boss know that I'm not interested in baby-sitting their problem child. I have not had to do this very often because we use ground-rules for team member behavior that are discussed during the kick-off of the project while everyone's Supervisor, the Project Champion and General Manager are in the room.

This type of behavior can show up at any time during the project whether it is executed through weekly team meetings or kaizen style locked in a room for a week. When the behavior arrives a the end of the week when everyone is tired and ready to go home, the aforementioned expert will begin to implement her solution. Another method to overcome is to provide everyone with a number of votes or rating system to use across different possible solutions. I have had good results with this style and will continue to use it in the future.


Ultimately setting the expectations for team behavior must be established early (and often). If you are on a team and you begin to recognize groupthink, it may be time to become the voice of dissension.

Just-In-Time for What?

What JIT is and what JIT is not...

Just-In-Time, three little words that strike fear in the hearts of American manufacturing.  Site Leaders, Production Control & Logistics Managers, Team Leads, Purchasing Directors, and the list goes on of people who thought JIT meant that we could close our warehouses and just order parts we need when we need them and not have to worry about anything else.

Sorry, but that is just not right.  We have seen the results; late parts that causes the lines to stop, creates new positions in the company called expeditors, generation of new reports on shortages with special color codes and plenty of columns of useless information.  People get fed up with this thinking and go rogue.  We "find" parts outside of the supply chain, usually in someone's "safety stock" in their desk.  But that will not sustain the system for long.

Now that the rant is over let's talk about what JIT really is.  Using Just-In-Time thinking requires alignment of all activities on the "thing" going through the process to the final (paying) customer.  JIT is a future state of thinking, a result of implementing the 5 steps of Lean Transformation.  Remember, Lean is not a program, but how we run the business.

As waste and variation are removed, you are left with a stable and predictable flow where the work can be loaded equally through the different value-added teams.  This gives you the chance to measure the material required to produce your product.  How much paper do you go through in a month?  What is the cost of office supplies?  How often do you need to archive data to keep your servers available?  Are your teams spread out randomly, only where you could find space, or are they strategically located near the customers?  What is the $$ value of your work in process?

Yes, those are a lot of questions!  Important questions, and you should be asking more, even snotty questions.  And don't forget to ask the team if there are any roadblocks that need to be knocked down.  The intent is to guide the improvement teams to think outside of their "safe" places.

But we are not harassing the team to implement your idea of how the process is supposed to operate in your head, but enable the teams to succeed.  These questions may push the team to create break-through process redesign.  In the end we are looking for processes that operate to customer needs at the lowest possible cost.

As your internal operations begin flowing predictably, it's time to look at your suppliers.  Do they really provide the items you need, when you need it, at the amount your need it, and the right quality?  More questions?  Yes!

Time to reliably replenish is the metric for suppliers.  It captures quality, on-time delivery, and order delivery levels.  Use this information to know if you need to work supplier development opportunities as they should pay off in the long-term.  And make sure you include your engineers, supply chain pros, and quality.

JIT is a great result to achieve.  Lower WIP costs (WIP = Labor + Material), and lower overhead because we are holding the right amount of stuff we need in stores to support our activities.  Don't just think of it as a factory target, but as one that pays back to the bottom line and increases shareholder value.

What Are the Right Measures to Use In the Office

It's Friday afternoon and it's quiet, almost too quiet.  Your phone rings and it's the boss telling you to come to her office, now.

What is it now?  I'm almost done with my TPS report and I have big plans this weekend!

You find your pen and something to write on, and head to her office.  It's like this every last Friday of the month, a panic discussion about the end of the month metrics.

We're overrunning our IT and overhead budgets, what sales orders can be closed before the end of the month, and which suppliers we put off paying for another 30 days?

It's the same panic-attack every month, and the last branch chief was worse.  We should be able to predict these things instead of going through all this drama.  Some way of looking each week to see how we are doing. But we don't work on a manufacturing floor, we push paper around the office, we are completely different.

Wow, I think we have seen this situation play out more than once.  The key here is not only figuring out how to avoid the panic attack, but to be able to predict how the month will end with plenty of time to respond.  This journey certain starts with recognizing who the customer is and what do they want.  If the thing we are working on goes to a customer whether inside or outside, we will use the Voice of the Customer (VOC) to develop our metrics.  If there are corporate or team objectives we reaching for, we will use Voice of the Business (VOB) to develop the metrics.

The VOC conversation starts with something like "what are the things about my product that need to be perfect?".  The "things" may focus on delivery, quality, cost, performance characteristics, or any other "thing" that may be on the customer's mind at that moment.  You will need to guide the conversation based on some feedback you may have or you will spend weeks in the weeds chasing rabbits. These conversations will help improve the relationships with your paying customers and provide a creative outlet for the team to work toward instead of the day-by-day painting of rocks trying to find the color the customer wants.

The VOB conversation is based on those corporate objectives that come down at the beginning of the year, newly created government regulations, or corporate governance policies.  The boss is giving you signals that you probably should not ignore and some exploration of details of how to execute policies can provide insight on how to measure the execution.

Take this information back to the team and explore their input on what those measures are and how that data is collected.  Do you have systems that you work within that collect time and date stamps, who is contributing to or approving steps in the work flow, track travel budget or sales totals?  These may be sources of data needed to create the metrics that can show if the team is on track or not.  It may take a little time to create a baseline, but you will soon be on your way to avert being blind-sided.

When you have the metrics created, don't just hide them on the corporate share-point servers.  Share them with the team, talk about the performance and maybe some root causes if the performance is not where it should be.  Teach the team how to talk about performance improvement and don't use a bunch of Japanese or Six Sigma words to show everyone how enlightened you are.  This is not a finger-pointing session.

In the mid-90's I worked for a telecommunication company in prototype manufacturing, building typical quantities from 1 to 10 with the median quantity being 2 or 3.  Our model was Low Volume/High Mix and we were in the change-over business.  The boss kicked-off one of our weekly staff meetings with the question, "Where is the waste in our processes?".  This was an odd question, and instead of someone asking what he meant by "waste", the two main factions began to attack each other.  The meeting did not end well, but it did start me thinking about how we transform information and material into circuit boards.

We had business goals (VOB), build prototype work orders in 3 days and pilot production work orders in 7 days.  This was easy to think about in manufacturing, but I was leading the machine programmers, we were creating software programs and reports.  In reality we had about 2 hours to complete our work that fed into the next steps of the process that eventually provided engineering with test results to a final customer that was buying our stuff.

Ultimately we had to show that we were helping to improve our processes and we did this through the use of metrics over time.  Metrics that were reviewed on a weekly basis with the actual team doing the actual work.  When we were aware of a problem, we would convene on that problem, talk about root causes, determine what to do about it, and update the deskguide we used for how we performed the work.  And all this was tracked in our metrics based on the reports we were producing.

As you begin looking at what you do and what metrics are relevant, what you finally decide to use may be very different compared to what you started with.  This is part of the journey, finding the right roads to take you where you are going.  And if you want something quick and dirty to start with, three popular measures are On-time Delivery, Percent Complete Delivered, and Quality Yield. Remain positive with the team, some emotions will rise up and remind everyone that we are in this together.