Some may scoff, others may scowl, but I will tell you an open secret, if you are not quality first, production goals will never be achieved. Sure, a company may hit a target now and then, of course a quarterly statement might come in on target, but reliable production cannot be achieved without quality focus and the following rules.
With more than 20 years’ experience in manufacturing, supply chains, logistics, call centers, and much more, the following production rules are at least a moment of your time for reading and two moments for consideration. Yes, there are a lot of people who will claim they have the path to success mapped and if you follow it, you to can achieve success. I am not one of them! I have tried and true lessons, I have common sense approaches, and I offer freely information that when combined with your knowledge, and the people you have working for you, solutions can be generated to achieve success.
- Quality is everyone’s job! – Tell me; whose job is it to pick up trash in the parking lot? How much litter is in your parking lot, trapped against the fence, collecting around the dumpsters, and crowding the floors of your facility inside and out?
- A colleague states the following:
- “I can tell you within five seconds after arriving the quality mindset of the facility I am visiting, by looking at the parking lot.”
- My colleague is correct; every facility I have visited that has had a clean parking lot, where employees and managers are picking up after themselves, has a quality culture worth emulation. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true!
- What does your parking lot look like?
- A colleague states the following:
- Never take your customer, employee, shareholder, vendor, etc., where YOUR brain has not traveled first! – I sat in a meeting where the leader openly admitted, after telling the new strategic focus, goals, and mission plan, when answering questions about this plan regarding implementation, stated, “I haven’t thought that far ahead.” That company is bankrupt. Not because they did not have good products, customers willing to buy, or great service, but because the leadership took the business places they had not personally already traveled in their minds.
- How can you expect any goal to be achieved if you cannot answer implementation questions?
- How can people follow if you do not know where you are headed?
- Where are you going and has your brain already traveled there?
- Data will be misinterpreted if specific explanations are not included! – New manager, fresh from school, knew all the lingo, had all the buzzwords memorized, was handed a sheet of data, and failed to comprehend what the data meant. Worse, he led others into ruin by misinterpreting data. If data is not explained, if the why behind data is not clearly understood, if the data story is incomplete, the data is useless, meaningless, and valueless!
- What is your data story?
- How do you train others in your data story?
- Can other people explain the why behind the data, or do they have to come to you for that explanation?
- When in doubt, trust your people! – Time does not allow me to relate even a tenth of the stories where the people have proven the data wrong, have gone above and beyond expectations, and achieved miracles. Yet too often the people are the first ones cut in a crisis.
- Juran’s Rule – When something is going wrong, 90% of the time it is the process, not the people. Yet, how many times are the people blamed for bad processes?
- Appreciative Inquiry – The theory that states that when you have a problem, the people already in the positions doing the job, hold the answers needed to fixing the problems. Yet, how many times are the people the first one’s lost in crisis?
- Data lies; humans live! – Recently the data stated that the problem in a facility was in a specific area. The specific area was encouraged to perform better. The management thought, “Problem solved.” Production goals were missed, more counseling to this specific area, more encouragement to achieve, more focused spending to target pain points. Still missed production goals. Nobody looked beyond what the data said was the problem, and the data was suffering from a pretty severe case of GIGO (Garbage In = Garbage Out). There was no production goal problem in the area specified, the problem was on the other side of the plant, and because of the investment in the wrong area, it took longer and more resources to fix the proper area.
- When data is purported to have “concluded” anything, first give it a reality check!
- Data is only as good as the inputs.
- Humans live in the real world, whereas data lives in an altered reality that mimics (rarely) the real world.
- Never forget, data lies. Data can, at best, only support a decision direction. Data cannot conclude, prove, or justify anything.
- The Rule of 6-P’s – The Rule of 6-P’s is known in various forms and words, but the sentiment is always the same, “Proper, Prior, Planning, Prevents, Purely, Poor, Performance.” Yet, how often is planning done without proper prior activities? How often is poor performance blamed on everything but poor prior planning?
- Do you know what proper prior planning looks like as an activity?
- What is involved in prior planning, and how do you tell the difference between proper and improper prior planning?
- Who is involved in prior planning and why are they there?
- Celebrate small achievements! – Here is another open secret, rarely implemented, always discounted, but remains the single most powerful tool in a leader’s toolbox, praise! That’s it. Praise is better than cash gifts for the brain, research and fMRI imagery support this conclusion. The research is fascinating. Yet, honest, regular, sincere praise continues to be the most overlooked aspect of leadership in business today!
- Praise is celebrating achievement with someone else.
- Celebrating success is imperative to moral, discipline, and enthusiasm in the workplace.
- When was the last time you showed genuine praise for your people? When was the last tangible “Thank you” witnessed? Who witnessed that gratitude, praise, and celebration?
- Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” Issue praise! Celebrate all achievements, but most of all celebrate the small achievements.
- Success is a choice, but you need everyone making this choice! – Find me a successful team where one team member is not fully and wholly committed to achieving success, and I will show you a team that missed achieving the highest success. Production goals are the exact same thing, if everyone on the team does not know the goal, know the why, and are committed to achieving the production goal, that goal will be missed!
- How do you find the person not interested in achieving the production goal; who is dropping trash and not picking it up?
- What do you do when the person is identified; that depends, are you a learning organization or a money pit? If a money pit, that person is fired. If a learning organization, then it is time to ask questions, discover reasons, and explore options.
- How do you choose to lead, carrot or stick?
- Success is designed; who is drawing the lines? – One of the most egregious problems in today’s world is the delegation of authority to those not worthy or capable. On a consultation the boss had delegated his role to an author of a book. Every question asked of the leader, he grabbed this author’s book and looked for an answer. The book is a good resource, but the lack of application to direct business problems was not the author’s intent and was beyond the authors ability.
- Who is drawing the lines designing what success looks like?
- Why?
- The Pyramid Analogy – Use it, Live it, Love it!
The Pyramid Analogy
Consider the triangle from geometry, there are six different classifications, all of which demonstrate production goal attainment, but only the equilateral triangle makes up the pyramid, and only the equilateral triangle can report success in production goal attainment.
Right Triangles:
A right triangle has one 90° angle.
The Acute:
The Acute Triangle has three acute angles (an acute angle measure less than 90°).
The Obtuse:
The Obtuse Triangle has an obtuse angle (an obtuse angle is more than 90°). Since the total degrees in any triangle is 180°, an obtuse triangle can only have one angle that measures more than 90°.
The Isosceles:
The Isosceles triangle has two equal sides and two equal angles.
The Scalene:
The Scalene Triangle has no congruent sides. In other words, each side must have a different length.
The Equilateral:
The Equilateral triangle has three congruent sides and three congruent angles. Each angle is 60°.
The Pyramid is an interesting shape, it is self-replicating from a single equilateral triangle. The pyramid is a five-sided object that represents one of the strongest shapes in the galaxy, with integrity to flex without breaking and being destroyed. Did you know that if you drew straight lines inside the equilateral triangle, and bent the triangle along those lines, a pyramid would take shape?
Consider the production environment and the variables generally fall into three categories, inbound, or products needed to make something for a customer; outbound, the product shipped to a customer; quality, the need to ensure the product is acceptable for the customer.
Using a right triangle, if outbound is the 90-degree angle, your quality is way out of reach, and inbound inputs and outbound deliveries are not being properly reviewed by quality. Thus, the production environment cannot function to its fullest potential, because all three, inbound, outbound, and quality, are not working equally together.
Take any other triangle and the story is exactly the same. When the inbound and the outbound are not equally bound to quality, and quality is not equally bound to inbound and outbound, resources are not properly shared, time is wasted, and production goals will never be met! Arrange the variables anyway you prefer, and if the pattern is not an equilateral pattern, there is a problem in the production environment and production goals will be missed, opportunities, lost, and money follows potential right out the door.
Follow the rules and watch production meet goals almost by magic. Fail to follow the rules and production will continue to struggle. Production goals are effort incarnate, humans pump efforts in, looking for results. The goals are statistical symbols reporting success, failure, and percentages of improvement towards goals. At then end of the day, the human element is the only variable worthy of consideration in meeting production goals, and quality is the badge of honor in human efforts. Thus, quality is the tool that promotes production goal attainment.
© 2021 M. Dave Salisbury
All Rights Reserved
The images used herein were obtained in the public domain; this author holds no copyright to the images displayed.
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