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Building an ant colony
How is it that ants are so successful? Is it their tremendous strength, natural instinct, superior survivability or is there another answer?
The reason is probably pretty obvious: The collaboration and cooperation of the many insignificant parts working as a single unity with every coordinated action of every individual working for the success and proliferation of the colony. What would your organization look like if it behaved like an ant colony? If you work for Toyota, you probably already know the answer to this question.
Many companies fail to gain any traction with change because they are unable to create an alignment of vision, strategy, belief and activity at all levels within the organization. People throughout the organization unwittingly work against the interest of the colony because of a range of different pressures, systems and policies. Bad systems beat good people every day, and the best companies have the best systems and this helps to grow the best people.
If we are to prosper, we must coordinate the hearts, minds and actions of all our people. I offer this simple model for creating organizational alignment. The Japanese call this way of managing and coordinating “hoshin kanri.”
Lewis Carroll wrote “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” We need to ensure that everyone in the organization knows where we are going and knows the road we are on together. It starts with our vision for excellence.
Vision
Your vision is not one of those single sentence motherhood statements, “We will be envied by our competitors and valued by our customers for our quality, service, blah, blah, blah.” We have all seen those mean nothing, say nothing, change nothing vision statements hanging in the foyer of countless corporate offices. To me they all look the same and could have all been taken from the same book of corporate vision statements.
Now close your eyes and imagine how good your company’s future could look on as many different levels possible. Imagine your people all enthusiastically participating in problem solving and daily improvement activities. Imagine customer information being processed to completion immediately after it arrives, and production commencing immediately after that. Imagine the alignment of your value streams through your customer’s organization, through yours and through your suppliers. Imagine components flowing from one manufacturing process immediately to the next with no waiting in piles of work-in-process inventory (WIP). Imagine raw materials flowing just in time in response to visual signals from your shop floor. Imagine organizational unity of purpose where the sales team are recognized and incentivised, not by the big “killer order” but by keeping order intake to a 5% span around the monthly mean. Imagine your accounting and measurement systems all in tune with and supporting this lean enterprise. This is your vision. This is your true north.
This vision is where your company is going. It must be an attractive destination that your people find intellectually and emotionally acceptable. Conflicts on either of these levels will ensure that commitment will not be possible. Above all, employees must find it an attainable and desirable future. The vision must be formulated by the executive and agreed at the highest levels within the company -- commitment is vital. This vision must be an easily and frequently articulated description of the future state. The frequent, free and passionate sharing of the vision is a major role of leadership. The leader must make it clear that the future is not somewhere we are going, it’s somewhere we are all making.
Strategy
If the vision is your destination, the strategy is your travel plan, which describes the company’s journey toward its vision. It must be well articulated, written, understood by all employees and discussed regularly by management. It must connect the present to the future (vision) in a clear and obvious way. The execution of your strategy is supported by the shared values of the organization. These values describe how we expect to behave on the journey. Our strategy must address such questions as:- Are our people ready?
- Where are the knowledge gaps?
- Is our structure appropriate?
- Are our measurement systems supportive?
Primary metrics
Around six to 10 key primary metrics are selected that measure our achievement of key strategic elements. The company executive group is held responsible for achieving the annual strategic objectives, and these might be:- Increase inventory turns by 50%
- Improve in-full, on-time delivery to 98%
- Reduce order to delivery average to two days
- Improve external quality to 15 parts per million
- Employee involvement increased 100%
- Profitability target
The primary metrics are reported and reviewed monthly on a one-page “traffic light” report describing your company’s progress in its strategy to achieve its vision. It takes the key indicators of success and assigns a color -- red for behind target, yellow for alert and green for on-plan.
Operating plans
Each business unit should have an improvement plan for the current year that advances the organization’s strategic journey toward its vision. These plans should enable the achievement of the primary metrics selected by the company executive. Each member of the business unit team should participate in and understand the plan. These plans should be specific and measurable against agreed milestones. They will take each strategic element and create a plan to achieve the annual target through the deployment of specific lean tools and programs. Under the strategic element of “increased inventory turns,” we might typically create a tactical plan such as:- Complete A, B, C (runners, repeaters, strangers) analysis of products
- Value stream map all ”A” items
- Create work cells
- Halve setup time
- Halve batch sizes
Secondary metrics
These milestones must be able to answer the question “where are we now?” This is a one to two-page traffic light report with the main tactical elements of the improvement program. These metrics are reviewed monthly. There must be tactical operating plans for the achievement of all the strategic elements. The second-level report must be able to show how we are tracking year-to-date in the achievement of this tactical plan for each element.
Work team objectives
Each work team must have targets for the achievement of the tactical items under their control. These would typically be things such as production to plan, first-time quality, employee hours per part, average number of setups, average setup times, number of continuous improvement ideas implemented, etc.
Visual management
It is important that these metrics be tracked by the people in the work teams and reviewed each day in their start-of-shift toolbox meeting. Site leadership has a vital role in taking a genuine and active interest in these metrics. This is how we show our people what is important. Some of the cell-level metrics might be:- Day-by-the-hour production
- Average setup time
- Actual versus plan run times
- First-time through quality
- Abnormality reporting
- Number of kaizens this month
The work teams record their performance with a white-board marker to ensure that they know whether they won or lost the game today. This gives the site’s leadership the opportunity to show appreciation for the effort made and offer help where required.
Reward, recognition and redirection: (aka – leadership)
RR&R must be soon, certain and significant if behavioral change is to result. Material reward (movie tickets, etc.) should be mainly team based and monthly in most cases, whereas recognition and redirection should be immediate. It is a basic human need to be appreciated and much of our human motivation in a work context comes from the fulfillment of this need. In an adult-to-adult relationship, people will accept redirection as the flip-side to the same coin as recognition. The development of this adult-to-adult relationship is vital in a world-class organization.
Personnel skills development plan
Training is delivered on a just-in-time basis to give the people the necessary skills to implement the plan.
Summary
Building an ant colony takes time, patience and planning, but the results of aligned thinking and action are worth the effort.
About the author
The past president of the Australian Association for Manufacturing Excellence, Gary Kerr coaches lean change champions in Australia and around the world. He publishes "The LLEAN Newsletter," where this article originally appeared. Gary can be contacted at gary.kerr@llean.com.au.
Copyright © 2010 Society of Manufacturing Engineers
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| October 10, 2006 Issue: |
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