Making performance visible and easily tracked powers your team members with the knowledge of achievements and areas for improvement.
I’ve spent my career working in a variety of manufacturing roles. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Knowledge is key. I believe it’s crucial to the success of any organization that performance is accessible by all functions within the organization. Your team members must have the knowledge and understanding of the goals of the organization and be able to track the progress toward meeting those goals or falling short of them.
I have spent over 10 years in various manufacturing leadership roles. During that time, I focused very intently on Digital Factory to drive technology in coordination with Continuous Improvement. I have worked to create a global playbook that emphasized the importance of quickly alerting your team members to challenges. The sooner the challenge is identified, the sooner it can be resolved. This is good for customers because it promotes transparency in communication, and it fosters innovation and product/process improvement.
Tiered meetings drive accountability and visibility. An agenda establishes who is responsible for leading the meeting and gives all attendees a road map of the information to be covered during the meeting. Each meeting offers the opportunity to reflect on the previous day’s work, review any outstanding tasks, and look ahead to the coming days.
It’s not enough to simply share that information during a tier meeting, but progress reports should be readily available at a glance. You must break down knowledge silos and give team members access to information in plain view of all tools, parts, production activities, indicators of production system performance, and accountability to actions, so the status of the system can be understood by everyone involved. Creating visual indicators helps motivate action by letting team members measure their own success. Some examples of KPIs we use in our MiTek plants are OEE, pounds per man-hour, master coil inventory, finished goods inventory, backorders, shipments on time in full, and, of course, safety.
To really create a culture of improvement though, communication must be multi-directional. Top-down communication simply won’t cut it; your front-line team members possess valuable insight for improving processes, and they should be empowered to share their input. The narratives shared by team members can be compared to production data to drive evidence-based decision making for the organization.
It is important to create a structured process for the escalation of issues to ensure a “Rapid Response” to an issue is identified at the appropriate level with the assigned resources. This escalation process provides for the communication of the resolution of issues from the Tier resolving the issues to the Tier raising the issue. This ensures all levels within the organization are both aware of the issue and the resolution as clear lines of communication are created with the daily boards.
Each day, progress can be tracked and communicated on a Daily Accountability Board, used to document assigned action for rapid resolution of problems and process improvement. This visual communication tool provides focus on the indicators showing gaps to targets, and it allows for the management of corrective actions and due dates.
To do this, you can utilize several communication tools including whiteboards and television monitors. Consider developing a strategy to utilize other tools to digitize the data, making it accessible everywhere. You want to ensure people working from home or traveling have the same visibility as those in the factory.
In a time where labor is scarce and the supply chain is stalled, efficiency is key to being able to deliver maximum output with the available work force. Finding ways to streamline processes even in small ways can add up to make a larger impact.
This approach is not about shrinking the workforce or eliminating people, rather, meeting our partners in their reality. You can create opportunities for more skilled team members to focus on the tasks that demand greater skill and attention.
Advances in technology are enabling new levels of factory-floor data collection, aggregation, visualization, and analytics. Production can be driven by real-time information that empowers your workforce to make immediate, data-driven decisions. More data means faster and better decisions, and process optimization leads to better efficiency, quality, and a competitive advantage for you.