Targeted Workgroups Solve Delivery Issues
Q. You know key metrics aren’t where they need to be. You’ve made adjustments to your staff. You think you have the right people in place, yet you’re still having problems. What can you do to move the needle forward?
Client
A midsized manufacturing plant that makes municipal water tanks.
Challenges
The plant was losing seven million dollars in sales of spare parts due to its inconsistent deliveries. Their on-time delivery rate was only 45%. Exacerbating this problem, leadership’s lack of confidence and ongoing frustrations had them making decisions from a blind spot.
The operations manager knew there was a problem. He had been asking his managers to work on improving the poor key metric for some time, and he had adjusted his staff. When the operations manager approached a partner for help, part of the solution on the table was to reduce the target metric to 70% on-time delivery, so that the team had to only make a 25% jump.
Solutions
At the plant, we worked with the client to decide who needs to participate in the problem-solving. Who gets pulled from their day-to-day work is a critical decision. When the people who do the work are not included in problem-solving, managers are keen to put countermeasures in place yet usually miss the root cause. Moreover, a misdirected focus on solving the wrong problem or blaming a person weakens the system—and begins the process of entropy.
Once we had identified the right people to have in the room, we facilitated a two-day, modularized, interactive group session with managers and employees. The session revealed that:
The inside sales person had no way to determine current status of an order and would often not be able to get accurate answers to critical questions.
The person creating the parts had no access to put parts in the computer. Instead, the parts were put on a shelf or in the system and not cataloged.
Armed with the missing knowledge, the group developed and implemented a coherent and clarified improvement process. The group walked through the process real-time, so that everyone in the room walked away with a clarified understanding of inputs, outputs, and issues at each phase. At the end of the session, we identified actions to create a plan that would be owned by managers and employees alike. The group left with a sense of confidence, clarity, and motivation.
Results
The root issues were clear, and employees developed simple solutions that included real-time uploading; better warehouse locators; clear, single points of accountability; and service standards for inquiries. Within two months, the plant increased their on-time delivery to 95%, and within several months, they had captured more than seven million dollars in sales.
