Junk the jargons

If you are an operations professional, you have heard about a whole lot of tools & methods; Lean, Six Sigma, TPM, VSM, Kanban, Kaizen, etc. If you are a CxO you have received advice / solicitation mails telling you the great benefits of all these tools/methods, received proposals etc.

Before you jump into the vast ocean that are these methods/tools, step back and spare a few moments to reflect on the following.

1. What is the vision/goals of your organization?

Congratulations! you certainly have one, however vaguely it is written down. However, what is more important to reflect is to define the values that will help you achieve this goals. Confused? Let me give you some pointers.

• What is your approach to quality?
• What is your approach to customer centricity?
• What is your approach to employees?
• What is your approach to developing products?
• What is your approach to product/service delivery?

Do spend time to articulate this. This is not extensive, but a good starting point. The most important element to this however ownership. This task is not for the managers; this task should be done exclusively by the owner and CEO. They alone should be responsible for crafting and communicating this. They should specify, how these will be measured and tracked.

2. How do you translate your vision and values to what the organization should do?

It is the job of functional leaders to develop the systems and process that will translate the vision and values to day to day functions. If your vision is to be a leader in quality, you must have process and system to measure your quality. If your vision is to provide the best customer experience, have systems and process to measure customer experience, continually evaluate customer needs and integrate them into design, production and delivery.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to ensure you deliver quality products, on time, safely and cost effectively?

Throw in tools required; use all the jargons. However, remember these things

• Use tools appropriately; a hammer instead of a task requiring screw driver will destroy the screw as well as the part
• Train the user; hammer in the hands of a baby is deadly.
• Use the right person; the functional leader is the wrong person to be the tool man

4. How do I know if I am successful?

Measure every process, measure output and check against standard. However, guard against these hazards

• Measurement by the person who does the task (meaning the frontline worker)
• Don't hide what you measured (for e.g. everyone needs to know if we made profits and how much, else it can create misunderstanding)
• Measure timely. No point in discovering at the end of the week that you produced poor quality on Monday
• Discuss and plan counter measures

If you want to be successful and sustainable, CEO's should focus on ensuring that vision/values/goals are understood and are being effectively deployed. They should be focused on only this element and constantly seek to ensure that organization is working towards these.

Functional leaders should be focussed on how well systems and process are delivering the goals. They should be focussing on coaching their frontline managers and supervisors are doing the right things; the right behaviours, selecting the right tools; executing the right projects etc.

Managers and supervisors need to be making sure that the process that they manage are standardized and working as intended; high quality, no rework, on time and safe. Use tools appropriately to improve processes. Ensure employees are trained and executing process correctly.

Employees must focus on delivering their tasks in a standard way, stop poor quality, measure their output and constantly focus on consistency.

All this requires less jargon and robust operations management. I would be surprised if this required any more than a daily management system and policy deployment

Krishnan Naganathan

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