Communicate the Goal.....

Early in my career I managed a manufacturing facility that produced high purity material sources used in the production of semiconductors. I soon learned that the plant generally met their monthly shipping target, but only due to a great push at the end of the month that required a lot of overtime. In the first two-week s of the month, very little made it off the shipping dock given the last minute push to get work in process items completed and shipped during the previous month. This was the typical shipping pattern:

I looked at all of the normal causes (or what I thought were normal causes). Certainly it must be the scheduling system of perhaps the production supervisors just weren’t following the schedules. But every attempt to make meaningful changes to smooth the production flow ended with just another last minute rush coupled with cost overruns.

About nine months into my tenure, I went to Palo Alto for a manufacturing managers meeting at the corporate headquarters. During a break, I was chatting with several of my peers from other divisions and began to lament about my shipping pattern dilemma. One of the “old timers” leaned back in his chair and said “Son, if you are not getting the results you think you should be getting, obviously you are not communicating the goal effectively”.

On the flight home I reflected on all my efforts to communicate the goal to my schedulers and my supervisors. Then it hit me. I needed to find a way to communicate to every employee in the plant and to do it in a way that was simple and reinforced on a continuous basis. It also had to be visual and not just me ranting or chanting on the production floor.

I put together a bar chart with the bar for each day being the total dollars that would have been shipped through that day if we had a perfectly smooth shipping pattern. Then each day I would update the chart with a line that showed our actual shipments against that target. It looked something like this:

Every morning, I would arrive at work before the first shift began and printed the results through the previous day and posted the chart on every bulletin board in the plant. The workers began to notice and would discuss where the line was relative to the height of the column. Within just a few months the plant had a very stable shipping pattern. The month end rush disappeared. Overtime became manageable and costs lowered.

It seems that the plant had developed a culture that rewarded the month end rush and every worker thought that was the expectation. When the entire workforce began to participate in the new, clearly communicated goal, they individually made small adjustments that collectively resulted in success.

In recent years, I had a similar experience in attempting to reduce cycle time in the issuance of purchase orders at a large university. Once we engaged the buyers and provided them daily feedback, we made meaningful progress. While the buyers had some difficulty with understanding month-to-date cycle time results, they did understand order backlog. They began to reassign work between buyer teams based upon numbers of purchase orders in backlog. This kept the focus on managing work in progress that contributed to significant reductions in cycle time.

That original advice that I had received in Palo Alto many years ago has proven over and over to be of value in my career. So, remember, “If you are not getting the results you think you should be getting, obviously you are not communicating the goal effectively”.