Learning My Lines

Recently in the UK we have had a change in train timetables, and quite separately, the introduction of a new social welfare system. The changes in each case were intended to come in ‘below the radar’; a continuation of daily life for the country’s citizens, instead the impact has been disastrous. The actions and decisions of a handful of people have, albeit unintentionally, caused enormous disruption and hardship for millions of people.

This has reminded me of another decision that very nearly caused tremendous disruption to the lives of thousands.

[Despite numerous requests over the years the actual company in question will not allow their name to be mentioned as there is still an element of embarrassment at what nearly happened.]

Once up on a time, in the days before anyone had heard of the millennium bug, there was a factory which produced two models of ...something, one per production line. The factory was owned by a world leader in something with factories in many countries.

In fact the CEO of the company had recently been to another of his factories, one with major industrial problems, and he left wanting to close the factory down (primarily because he had been given such a bad reception by the work force).

Shortly thereafter he visited the factory of our story, let’s call it W, and W just happened to be the second most efficient factory of something in the world (sounds like a song…)

What surprised the CEO was that while W was so efficient he could see gaps in the production line, lots of them. He could see:

unit unit gap gap gap unit unit unit gap gap unit gap gap unit unit …

And it was very similar on the other line.

Now a big problem with being CEO in certain cultures is that when you make a bad decision no-one is brave enough to tell you that you are making a mistake, and while that was true here, it was also the case that the CEO had surrounded himself with senior managers who didn’t really know very much about their own industry. That is my explanation for how, when the CEO suggested that W should have its lines joined in several places to allow the existing models to move from one line to the other so that gaps could be taken advantage of, and thereby allow a third model to be produced (i.e. the one from the factory he wanted to close down)…nobody argued.

The CEO and his team did realise however that to allow any model to travel over almost any part of the factory floor, the lines and the trolleys which carried the units on the lines, would all need to be replaced. All of this would take time and a very large amount of investment. An estimate of 6 years was determined, together with a high-level plan for change. The CEO signed off the outline cost of this massive transformation before the end of his visit.

Such is the way that decisions of enormous importance can be made, affecting the working lives of thousands of people. It is said that President Reagan agreed to the multi-billion dollar ‘Star Wars’ initiative during a restaurant discussion with calculations made on the back of a napkin; something similar had just happened to our factory.

Three years after the CEO’s fateful visit, and with three years to go before the planned date of cutover to the new production system, an increasingly stressed group of production schedulers finally raised a white flag.

The schedulers had a vital function within the factory, they were responsible for ensuring all units were built on time while following the prevailing production sequencing rules, and that the factory operated as efficiently as possible. To be clear sequencing rules weren't just nice-to-have's, in many cases if they were broken the production line would stop and chaos on the scale of a major airport on Bank Holiday Monday would ensue.

What is a sequencing rule? Now I am being told that most of you would not ask that particular question, so let me just say that there were lots of them, and they made things very complex.

It is likely that when raising their hands, the schedulers simply thought that the CEO's change would be cancelled and everybody would go on as before (Brexit anyone?) but unbeknown to them the world was changing; if the investment was lost then there would be terrible consequences. This factory was not only the largest employer by far in the area, it also spawned many smaller associated companies such as tool makers, delivery companies, caterers, etc. and without the factory the area would become an industrial desert and a large vibrant community would be decimated.

The schedulers’ white flag signalled factory closure, and it was only then that the true impact of the CEO’s earlier decision became clear to the factory’s management.

It was at this point that I received a phone call.

Initially I was asked to be part of a team that would deliver the scheduling solution for W. It would be my role to head up the design as I had just completed a world-first scheduling project for a national rail company. The project manager was another managing consultant from our Decision Sciences practice who had already led a number of high-profile projects.

Our first action was to visit a German company deep in the heart of Bavaria, this company was at the time the world leader in production scheduling software. I will never forget the chief architect’s words, and you have to imagine they were spoken with a hearty German laugh:

“Ha, zey are joining zee production lines, zis is a well-known problem - it can’t be done – it eeez immmmpossible”, in my life I have never seen a man more enjoy the torment of another.

To understand my reaction you should know that I come from the Highlands of Scotland with ancestors shared equally between Celts and Vikings; on my mother’s knee I was taught: “there is no such word as can’t”. So this Bavarian’s statement, rather than achieving its design, simply raised my blood for the challenge.

We returned to the factory and began the process of system and business analysis in earnest, determined to find a way. Over a three-month period we interviewed, documented, modelled and workshop-ed every aspect of the factory. We reviewed journals and papers on production scheduling, discussed software options with a myriad of suppliers and development houses. And at the end of that time we had a large office full of ‘wall paper’ …but no design, not even a concept.

At that point our analysis was complete there was no relevant area of the factory or of the business processes that we had not analysed and incorporated in to our models. We knew what was required, but we still did not know how it could be done, and the Bavarian’s words were ringing ever more loudly in my mind.

I called for an emergency week-long workshop of the key players to attempt to break the impasse. The 20-strong team (split roughly 50-50 between client and our consultancy) trooped in to the largest room available that Monday morning, everyone very clear that we were in trouble.

Three months earlier most of this group were strangers but now we knew each other well, we had gone round the loop of forming, storming, norming, performing; storming was definitely interesting, and we had ‘made our bones’, we had respect, we had a fair understanding of the capabilities of each member of that team, we were a fellowship.

Once in, I pretended to lock the door and announced:

“No-one is leaving this room until we have a solution” – I could only be semi-serious, the toilets were at the other end of the building.

The walls of the room were covered in our business and system models, in addition there were lists of requirements, lists of sequencing rules and lists of other constraints that we had to satisfy. There was also a large schematic map of the factory showing the two production lines joined through connecting lines at various points.

My plan was to go through each of our models one by one to ensure that everyone had a complete and common understanding of the problem and its environment, and then we might somehow identify a solution…it wasn’t much of a plan.

Monday came and went, by the end of the day we had covered half of the first wall and things were not going well; we had uncovered even more constraints, in effect we were making the problem worse. I got no sleep that night.

Tuesday arrived and the team assembled at the same time as the previous day but the mood had changed, we had achieved a common understanding alright, it just wasn’t the one I was looking for. I kept my doubts to myself but anyone who has worked with me will tell you I have a lousy poker face.

Around 11.30 am on that Tuesday we started on the next model on the wall; ‘the Volume Plan’. The volume plan was effectively a historical record of how many workers were assigned to each point in the factory for a given shift depending on the number and type of items that were being produced.

A member of the client team explained that the volume plan was not just a record, it had been created from empirical data and was used each week to configure the factory based on the total number of units to be produced. So this was yet another set of constraints that we would have to satisfy. It was around then that I began thinking we were all going down for the third time.

Hoping for silence, I said, “Right, if no-one has got anything else on the Volume Plan then we will move on to the next system…”

I noticed the project manager hesitantly take a pen from his lips, point it, almost wave it at the chart, and in slow motion [is how I remember it] look across to me and say:

“Hang on, we are not using all the information in that data”

Not a single syllable of this was wasted on me; it was the first time since the beginning of the project that anyone had said ‘hang on’, and the other words had the hairs on the back of my neck standing proud. I could see others moving in their chairs. My heart was racing.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know, except there is something here”

Now this is a bit like speaking in tongues but there were a few of us in the room who knew what he meant.

People started to shout out small facts.

“Each line is made up of zones”

“We know how many units go through a zone in a shift”

“We know the rate at which the line moves”

“So if a unit starts a zone at a certain time, we know when it will come to the other end of that zone”

“The lines merge at the junctions between zones”

…..

This went on like a snowball downhill, gathering weight and momentum. At last I could sense the project moving, accelerating, in the right direction… we all could.

By the end of that day we had described an approach that allowed us to divide what was a single ‘impossible’ problem, in to two problems which were both solvable.

That night I slept like a log.

[Believe me I would love to tell you how we did this, in fact an early draft of this document did exactly that, but both my wife, and my daughter Olivia, begged me to remove it as they lost the will to live when reviewing. So I will gloss over and simply say that it took a further month to provide proof of concept.]

18 months later we delivered the complete solution and our system has been scheduling production at that particular factory ever since.

Finding that solution meant securing the long-term future of the factory, many hundreds more people were given work in the area, and it significantly improved the bottom line for the company.

All of us who worked on that project learned an enormous amount about ourselves and what can be done when people work together. Yes, there was an element of luck, but you have to create the right environment for luck to work, and as Arnold Palmer used to say:

‘the more I practise the luckier I get’

The way seemed very black for most of the first three months of that project but we just kept going, knowing that we were doing the right thing. And we kept each other going; there were at least a couple of times when my reserves of energy and belief were on empty, and when the encouraging smiles and words from others made all the difference.

So what should we take from this?

Faced with a problem that had never been solved before, a team working together solved it, something that I truly believe was beyond the capabilities of any one individual.

And as for what prompted my article?

What people in senior positions of power need to understand is that large organisations cannot be understood by any one individual; the true problem, the impact and the solution are all buried in complexity. National rail timetables should only ever be changed very gradually, and people who are utterly dependent on social welfare should not be suddenly left penniless for months.

Nobody gets out of bed planning to screw up everyone else’s day but sometimes people are unaware of the impacts of their decisions and actions.

So if you think that you might have influence over the lives of others then here are two rules to consider:

1.      Surround yourself with good people.

2.      Don’t make rash decisions.

And if things have already gone too far? Give my office a call.

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Iain Maclean is a partner with M2P a management consultancy based in Frankfurt, and managing director of ICIFM a management consultancy specialising in programme direction and management.

Here are some other articles by Iain:

• Learning to Fly
• Learning to Sing
• Learning the Hard Way
• Learning from the Best
• Learning the Secret to Success
• Learning from the Bridge
• Learning from Rugby