Rather, the focus should be on the prime imperative. This creates clarity and consistency for those who have to carry out the bulk of the implementation. The other imperatives can be considered later, once the initial gains have been achieved.
Once the prime imperative has been identified, the key elements from the production system’s toolbox for capturing value can be identified. The most basic view of production systems assumes that improved performance comes from implementing more intelligent processes and working practices. With this in mind, many plant transformations start with embedding concepts like kanban, multiskilling, and pokayoke.
But in brownfield factories, inefficient practices and processes constitute only one of three reasons for poor performance — and represent only 40 percent of the potential gains in productivity. Our research indicates that pure overstaffing — more personnel than work — on average constitutes 35 percent of the potential, and redundant or low-value-added tasks constitute another 25 percent. No change in working methods is required to tap these two sources of inefficiency.
In Western Europe and North America, the average plant has at least as much to gain from eliminating excesses as it has from embedding more intelligent work practices and processes. However, traditional production systems offer little guidance on how to identify these excesses — and even less on how to remove them in the Western context of labor laws and unions. This is not surprising, as these production systems are typically designed for consensus-oriented, greenfield environments. Many attempts to install production systems fail because companies ignore these simple facts. Indeed, implementing smarter practices and processes in overstaffed plant organizations is a steep uphill battle, primarily because overstaffing is a significant cause of undermotivated plant communities. We call this the “fat ballerina” principle: A manufacturing operation should really get in shape before starting to dance.
Momentum. What is the best way to spread the new knowledge across plants and hierarchies, countries, and cultures? And how can employee motivation and senior management sponsorship be secured along the way?
Sustained momentum is required to overcome cultural inertia. Most brownfield shop-floor communities are only loosely attached to the interests of the company. The typical operator or technician is tired of repetitive and top-down improvement efforts and suspicious of the intentions of senior management. Even plant managers, more often than not, show a stronger loyalty to their profession and their region than to the company that employs them.
The average tenure of a brownfield employee is 20 years. In that time, he or she witnesses many step-change improvement programs come and go without discernible effect. How can these jaded employees be motivated, with such a negative atmosphere hanging over the workplace?
In our experience, there are three basic ways of engaging plant communities to support substantially new ways of working:
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Instilling fear (“We’ll move the plant to Ukraine”): This tactic is inevitably less effective each time it is applied; it typically works just once or twice, and then only if credible.
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Leveraging greed (“If asset utilization increases by X percent, the team will receive a bonus of Y”): The problem with this approach is that the reason the new system is introduced in the first place is the need to create savings. And the effect of bonuses is temporary. Yet there is no doubt in our minds that almost all manufacturing excellence programs fail to share enough gains with shop-floor communities.
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Generating pride (“We’ll show the executive suite that we’re the best”): This is the most sustainable tactic, but the hardest to pull off. A successful example is tire company Michelin’s motivation of the workforce at one of its plants.
