Product vs Process Focus
Are you focused on manufacturing great products or designing great processes?
Not sure? Here's a quick check. Are you constantly inspecting parts throughout production to make sure they're right? QA/QC stationed at various points? Worst case, is QC at the very end and a focal point of the process? Most important, what do you do when you find a bad part? Are you reprimanding employees for not doing a good enough job? Keeping track of the data to show which employees have the most quality problems? Does everything become a 'training' issue? Do you immediately issue a rework job to make new parts, hustle that job through the process, and then breathe a sigh of relief that the customer wasn't impacted? Are you always trying to buy new technologies to help you make better products (more data, more documentation)? Then you're product focused. And that's bad - if you want to be profitable.
On a different note, are you constantly thinking about new ways to take steps out of the process? Making it simpler, easier, more dependable? Are you building intelligence into your processes so they can stop themselves before a bad part is made (autonomation)? When a bad part is detected, are you investigating into what exactly happened and relentless about finding a preventative action? Most important, are you rewarding employees for discovering problems? If an employee makes a mistake, do you see it as a sign that the process isn't good enough? And you work together to find a solution to build-in even more intelligence so it never happens again? Are you designing new solutions that fit perfectly within your business? Then you're process focused. And that's good. Because you're going to make a lot of money, have good morale, good culture, and happy customers.
Lean Manufacturing, at it's heart, is a quality-focused, process-driven approach to improvement. For a company to thrive, it has to make money. And you can't make money if your processes aren't very good. Your products can be fantastic, but once competitors that are process-focused come in you will be forced out of the market. You'll complain that it's China, or low cost labor, or the economy, or unfair customers who just don't understand. You're right, they don't. They don't understand why you charge so much, take so long, and still can't ship everything perfectly. They don't understand why they can't change their due dates, change their orders, or just change their minds without causing massive headaches. They don't understand why you haven't embraced a lean approach to process design and improvement.
Elon Musk has described the Gigafactory as the machine that builds the machine. He has stated the real innovation in the upcoming Model 3 isn't the car - it's the production facility. It's been designed from the ground up to be hyper efficient. And the improvement opportunity is an order of magnitude greater by focusing on the process rather than the product. He believes the real competitive advantage in the Model 3 isn't all the neat features of the product (because competitors can always copy those) - it's the engineering of the factory. The article above is an incredible view into the mind of one of the best inventors on the planet today.
The next decade of manufacturing will be the age of enlightenment. Processes will become extremely intelligent. Process Engineers will do hardcore engineering - they will design solutions from the ground up. Machines will talk. And they will tell you when something isn't right. They will stop automatically before something bad is made. Automatically. All the time. Every time. Processes will flow from step to step with almost no inventory between operations. And the steps will be minimized, streamlined, and optimized. You'll never have to worry about making bad parts because they will never be produced in the first place. All the technology exists and it gets better every year. The tools are there, and you're competitors are working on this right now. They are working on designing processes specifically around their business to make them as efficient and intelligent as possible. And if you don't get there before they do, good luck.