Production and Manufacturing is the heart and lifeblood of a company. Manufacturing is where ideas and designs come to fruition. Production ultimately determines whether our methods, resources, and materials are viable and offers the anticipated return. Successful companies constantly monitor, review, and revamp their best practices to predictably deliver a quality product to market at a price that allows financial profit for the organization.
How to Avoid Barriers to High-Performance Management
When companies have barriers or gaps in performance, leadership needs to quickly identify issues, assign and empower resources, drive to root-causes, and affect the necessary solutions to avoid these issues becoming chronic or catastrophic. Successful companies must have a rigorous and detailed problem-solving methodology in which everyone is empowered to play their prescribed parts, at the right time, with the right focus to enable continuous process improvement.
Execution of this protocol must have a foundation based on measurement systems that deliver facts – data that is timely, accurate, and adequate. This information must be presented in a form that is routinely reviewed by all stakeholders, and can easily and quickly be made actionable. In operations, high-performance management is determined by how well leadership sets up their teams for success by providing structure and avid support for this problem-solving methodology. This aspect is just as critical to the success of an organization as having good processes and products to begin with — and is often the most overlooked.
Key Areas for Improvement in Organizational Engineering
Managing human capital is a big part of the equation whether you are dealing with process design or refinement. Quite often, the need for improvement begins with such basic initiatives as establishment and validation of expectations or the appropriate flow-down or communication of those expectations. A poor system of measuring value of performance to expectation, then recognizing or holding personnel accountable, can be done both effectively and ineffectively. Various levels and positions within the organization require different skill sets. Understanding gaps between what you have and what you need to be successful requires some delicate work.
In some cases, required improvements take shape in areas such as personnel development, or recruitment and retention. These areas as well as decision-making protocols regarding setting or altering spans of control, establishing or altering roles and responsibilities, change management, and other requisite requirements constitute Organizational Engineering. The need for improvement can take shape in this arena as well as in the more traditional areas.
Issues to Address in Operational Engineering
When thinking of process improvement, operational engineering is the area that traditionally is considered first. Reducing costs by improving quality, delivery performance and asset management while reducing waste and process variation in manufacturing poses significant challenges and is most often the tip of sword for improvement efforts. Implementation of LEAN principles is Implementation Engineers’ primary tool of choice to eliminate waste in any process.
Huge gains are usually possible by focusing on flow and minimizing resources and efforts required to complete any task. Process refinement or redesign should always be exhausted before entertaining a capital solution — and is most often available. Defining value from the eyes of the customer and flowing that value from beginning to end is our objective.
Six Sigma methodologies are deployed primarily when the focus is on reducing process variation. Regardless of the target and methods or tools deployed, we work collaboratively across all functional areas of our client organizations in pursuit of sustainable results. The key to success is to allow the specific improvement target to determine the appropriate method or tool as opposed to attempts to conform the problem to a single methodology. Sustainability is bolstered through involvement of the stakeholders in the root-cause determination and solutioning.
What are some of your experiences in improving Organizational and Operational Engineering? We would love to hear from you.
Who We Are
Implementation Engineers is a Performance Excellence company that partners with visionary leaders at organizations looking for a sustainable operating income impact. Since 1963 we have consistently delivered long term EBITDA growth for our clients through our expertise and sustainable implementation methodology. For this reason, our services go Beyond Consulting SM.
