|
|
Twenty years of CI lessons: priceless
 The following article is written by Cristi Cristich, president and CEO of Cristek Interconnects Inc., a company she founded in 1985 at the age of 23. Cristek is headquartered in Anaheim, Calif. and has 140 employees.
How many times have you performed root cause analysis and corrective action on a problem in your company only to have that very same issue bite you again months or years down the road? Even worse, how much time and money have you invested in blitzes, kaizens and improvement projects that yielded dramatic results only to find everything slip back to the old ways once you walk away to fight the next fire?
I am embarrassed to admit that for nearly 20 years I wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of company assets and lost millions of dollars of customer goodwill because I was unsuccessful in leading the Cristek team to sustain hard-fought improvements. After all, it certainly isn’t a continuous improvement (CI) program if you have to keep fixing the same issues over and over again, and you never get to build on past successes.
A little over three years ago, I finally found the tools to break this debilitating cycle. As a result, bottom-line results, employee morale and customer satisfaction have soared while my hours of lost sleep have plummeted! Three keys to our success:- Generation of an integrated improvement plan in the context of a holistic company view.
- Provision of a system where continuous improvement is an ongoing process and not an event.
- Ensured alignment between individual employee objectives, compensation, and recognition and the company’s overall objectives and initiatives.
A holistic viewNone of the disciplines or processes within our company exists in a vacuum. So, “fixing” one process typically impacts another. In addition to dealing with the unintended consequences of this silo mentality, we recognized in 2004 that nearly all of our key processes needed substantial work if the company was going to survive.
I knew that to make sense of the scope and complexity of the work ahead of us, we had to take a step back and first create a company-wide “change vision.” We then had to make sure company objectives, strategies and structure supported that vision and we had to carry these threads all the way through to the departmental and individual employee levels.
Cristek’s vision of continuous improvement is defined as “Mission RADIness.” The RADI acronym stands for reliable, aligned, disciplined and innovative. Cristek needs to “RADI” with its people, processes and tools. This vision provides the context within which we develop the specifics of the company business plan and within it the specific continuous improvement plans.
Once that was accomplished the hard work of mapping and prioritizing everything we needed to address began. Even though we could only actually work on a couple of areas at one time, all improvements were made in the context of the overall plan and in consideration of other areas that would soon be impacted. At the outset of this effort we adopted a tool developed by the Supplier Excellence Alliance (SEA) called the “SEA Roadmap” and used the processes and best practices contained in it as a framework for our planning.
Continuous improvement as a systematic processA major part of our holistic planning process included listing the critical processes used in our business and assessing their maturity against the SEA Process Maturity Model used in conjunction with the SEA Roadmap. Our initial assessment revealed that most processes were at a process maturity of zero or one. This meant that few of our processes had yet to be even named. At the time, I remember wondering how we could be an ISO 9001:2000 registered company with such a dismal process maturity.
Goals and prioritiesI knew we had terrific folks working hard for the company, but like many small companies, our competitive advantage had a great deal to do with strong “tribal knowledge.” The single most important moment in the transformation of our company came when I realized that to continue our growth we had to find a way to leverage the wonderful skills and company “recipes” that had brought us our early success. Adopting the process maturity model was the key to this.
We began to immediately define process champions and owners for each key process and set maturity goals for the coming months and years. The imperative was to develop as many processes as possible to a level 3 as quickly as we could. As we prioritized these process maturity goals, they became the centerpiece of our company-wide continuous improvement plan.
The owner of a process is responsible for its overall “health,” which we now express in terms of a process maturity score. To develop a process-to-process maturity level 3 (PML 3), the owner must ensure the process is properly documented; that master trainers are deployed; and that everyone performing the process is trained to execute it in the same manner. Since the inception of this approach, Cristek’s average PML has gone from .55 to 3.5.
As the company’s expertise in process management improves, it is desirable to push ownership of the processes out of management and as close to those actually performing the process as possible. These employees often do not have direct authority over the resources they will need to achieve their objectives, so process champions become important. Process champions exist to support the owners. They operate at the top levels of the organization, coaching the process owners and removing obstacles and potential resource conflicts.
Ensuring alignment
The final and most challenging foundational element in Cristek’s continuous improvement process is to maintain alignment up and down and across the entire organization. Like many companies prior to 2004, we had a company plan that was reasonably well aligned. Individual, departmental and company objectives were largely synchronized, but metrics, employee skills, performance development/assessment and recognition (formal and informal) were not. The company planning process was easily updated to include metrics and recognition systems, but aligning employee skills was more difficult.
Since then, Cristek has developed an employee development workbook, which includes objectives, processes owned, and hard and soft skills required for success. This part of our transformation is the least mature and has been the most difficult to execute, but I can see our most dramatic successes occur in the areas where alignment is best.
Customer focus is keyIn summary, if these efforts are not customer focused, and if we do not find ways to increase our value proposition to the customer each year, then our hard work will not generate our top-line revenue goal. The Cristek quality policy was rewritten in 2006 to reflect this customer-centric approach. We all know that delivery and quality can be forced for some period of time, but sustained performance over years and especially during times of rapid growth cannot occur without a systematic approach to continuous improvement. We have also added the “on demand service” component because when our customer knows he can absolutely count on Cristek to be agile enough to provide “no doubt” delivery and quality in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances, we stand out from the crowd of suppliers clamoring for their business.
Cristek’s journey to “no doubt” execution continues. And, yes, we may at times take a minor detour. But the great news is that it has been three years since I have found our team retracing its steps along any of the sink-hole-riddled roads of the past.
Click for more about . . .
Copyright © 2010 Society of Manufacturing Engineers
SME Customer Service: 1-800-733-4763
|
|
|
|
 |
| December 10, 2007 Issue: |
|
|
