First Impressions of the Plant

First Impressions of the Plant

When I sat down to collect my thoughts, I realized that my impressions were even worse than I had consciously realized. Without the threat of George knocking me on my butt, the truth of what I saw came out pretty freely—and the truth was ugly. The word “ugly” stuck in my mind.

I remembered that when I got started in consulting, a friend in the business told me, “You never want to tell the customer he has an ugly baby.” That was his not-so-charming way of saying that you don’t badmouth the customers’ processes or initiatives—especially when they’ve attempted to instill a positive improvement.

I tried to keep that in mind as I prepared my notes, but it wasn’t easy. Sid had an ugly baby.

At exactly 4:30 p.m., I walked out of the conference room and headed toward Sid’s office. About 20 feet from the door, George called from behind, “Hey, Sam, wait up.” He jogged the few steps to catch up with me and said, “Hope you don’t mind, but Sid asked me to join you.”

Sid was waiting and looked eager, so I began talking as soon as we had exchanged pleasantries. Now, sensitive I’m not. If I were, I would have noticed the look on both their faces as I waded deeper into my impressions of the facility. When I was finished running down my laundry list of things that were wrong, I looked up at them and was genuinely amazed by the shocked look in their eyes.

I immediately looked down at the scribbled notes in my lap to see what I had said that would have been so devastating to the two men:

• The plant is filthy.
• There’s no control of parts that don’t meet specifications.
• There’s no semblance of lot control for work in process or finished goods inventory.
• Operators are performing their work sloppily and to no particular standard.
• There’s no apparent flow to the processes.
• There’s so much inventory that no one knows what they have and what they don’t have.
• There are excess and broken tooling and fixtures scattered everywhere in the plant.
• The lighting is very poor and work conditions are unsafe.
• All raw inventory is contaminated and there is no sure method of controlling inventory. Raw material is stored alongside the production lines and appears to have been there for years.
• Material handlers are running all over the plant with nothing on their forklifts, wasting gas and endangering each other and the process operators.
• Hazardous material is not stored properly.
• There are years of inventory on trailers out back. (This is what I was afraid of when I parked earlier in the day.)
• The few control charts scattered about the plant are outdated by months—but no one is even looking at them anyway, thank goodness!
• The processes are producing in batches because the setup times are so long.
• The last processes before final inspection are being starved for part assemblies for hours because of the batch and queue methods.
• People are standing all over the plant waiting for something to do.

Uh-oh, maybe I’d gone a little overboard! Sometimes I have a tendency to forget that I’m talking about someone’s business when I give my impressions.

From the looks on their faces, I may have just stepped over the line. I slowly moved my chair a little closer to the door. As an afterthought, I finished my onslaught with “Look at it this way: knowing there’s a problem is half the battle.”

Sometimes only people on the outside will make honest, candid assessments of a process or business.

Sid took a minute before he responded. I’m sure he was clenching and unclenching his fists under the desk.

“Sam, I’m not sure you remember why I asked you here.” He cleared his throat and continued. “I’m not looking for your opinion of the state of my company.” More throat clearing. “I just wanted to know which machine I should purchase to make sure I meet my upcoming customer demands.”

My response to this comment made my earlier litany look like child’s play. I looked directly at him and spoke once more without my “fit for human interaction filter” in the “on” position.

“Look, Sid, if you keep up the way you’re going out there today, you won’t have any problems meeting your customer demands—because you won’t have any customers.”

Before Sid could get in his next comment, I decided to finish my thoughts.

I don’t know exactly the words I used, but they were something to the extent that SG’s quality had to be below one sigma with all the things they were doing wrong and that their inventory turns were a joke.

They looked puzzled. After I paused to let it sink in, I made my point. “One sigma,” I explained, “means your yield is only 31%. Most company operate at between three and four sigma, which means yields around 93% to 99%.”

Then I pointed out that if they wanted to compete in today’s market, they were going to have to learn to be more efficient and focus on eliminating waste from all their processes, because if their manufacturing processes were bad, I had to assume that their transactional processes were in even worse shape. Of course we couldn’t be sure because everything was in such disarray that we couldn’t even tell how bad things were. On top of all that, the employees were so pissed off that they wouldn’t tell you if the building was burning down.

George finally shook himself out of shock and said there was no way I could tell all those things from a brief 45-minute walk through the plant. He also mumbled under his breath that he should have

known I’d try to dig in and get paid my daily rate forever….

Ignoring the last comment, I conceded that George might be right about my quick assessment. So I asked some basic questions:

• What are your inventory turns?
• What is your overall quality level?
• Do you measure quality as a percentage or as parts per million?
• Do you final-inspect every product you build?
• How do you determine your inventory levels?
• What does your preventive maintenance schedule look like?
• What is your operator interface? How does an operator know the state of the process?
• Are your margins on some products negative?
• Do your employees understand the concept of waste?
• When was the last employee suggestion for improvement made?
• How often do you conduct a physical inventory?
• What is the rate of over/under you typically see in inventory?

As George responded to each of my questions (usually failing to provide an answer other than “I don’t know”), a look of caution began to form on Sid’s face.

By the time the questions were through, Sid looked at me and said, “I’ve heard about that sigma stuff and inventory turns, but I don’t really know much about any of it. So what should I do?”

The answer I gave really surprised Sid—and I think it pissed him off as well.

“We need to get organized out there.

“Just give me a week and I’ll work with one of your teams and we’ll start a program of Five S in your facility. I’ll teach them what Five S means and how it applies, then work with them to establish the principles in their work area. After that, we can select some of your more dedicated people and have them teach the technique across the organization.”

Establish metrics that are meaningful for the health of your business. Metrics—measures against which current procedures and finished products can be compared—will be different for each organization. These metrics will be the goals that the company should always be working to achieve. If it matters, it will be measured.

At this George started forming a smile that grew until finally he was grinning from ear to ear.

“Yeah,” he said, I’m gonna love seeing you try to get these guys to clean up their work area. There’s no way in hell they’ll ever do it. We can’t even get them to walk to the trash can at lunch time. They just leave everything laying all over the snack bar for someone else to clean up.”

George went on to explain how SG had to hire a cleanup crew to go behind every shift and pick up after the employees in order to keep the health inspector off their case.

I gave George my “I understand” nod and said, “Just give me the week and tell me where you want to start. If I fail, you pay for one week and I’ll be gone. If I succeed, you may find that we can increase your capacity and margins considerably without any capital expense—and that would be a good thing.”

George started to argue, but Sid held up his hand and said, “You’ve got a deal. Tell us which day you want to start; we’ll have the training room set up and the people there for you. You have one week to make this Five S thing work. Then we’ll meet with the team you’re training and discuss the results.”

George just shook his head and looked at the floor.

After giving Celia the date I wanted to have the first session and shaking hands with Sid and George, I walked out to the car to drive home. It was already dark outside and I had a lot of planning and

thinking to do.

Key Points

• To compete in today’s market, companies must learn to be more efficient and focus on eliminating waste from all their processes.
• A good way to begin a Lean Six Sigma initiative is with a program of Five S.