This posting is a continuation of my series on how I first got started with the Theory of Constraints and the integration of TOC with Lean and Six Sgma.
As I held my breath, a team of experts
checked and re-checked the control points on 10 different hardtops and to my
jubilation every single measurement was conforming. So much so that the head of purchasing told
me in his heavy German accent that his team had never encountered such
“perfect” parts before on any audit. He
then selected a hardtop and we had it mounted on his Z3. He instructed me to drive to the Interstate
so that he could listen for air leaks between the hardtop and the mounting
surface. We were traveling the speed
limit (65 mph) and he instructed me to speed up to 70 mph. He said nothing as his ear was now almost
touching the windshield carefully listening.
He told me to increase my speed, but didn’t tell me how fast, so I
floored it. At 95 mph he leaned over,
smiled and told me I could slow down, but of course I didn’t. When we hit 110 mph, I could see distress in
his eyes so I slowed down to the speed limit.
As we pulled into the plant parking lot, he simply looked at me, pointed
to the hardtop and said, “Great hardtop!”
It was clear that we had passed his hearing test with flying colors.
Once back inside the plant, the head of worldwide purchasing wanted to mount a
second hardtop, apparently to compare our paint job to his Z3’s paint job. We mounted the hardtop and he proceeded to
walk around the vehicle several times, meticulously assessing our paint quality. With his hand stroking his chin, he said,
“Mr. Sproull, we have a big problem!” I shuttered to imagine what was wrong with our paint job and he nervously replied, “There is
nothing wrong with your paint job Mr. Sproull, but it doesn’t match our own
vehicle.” I pressed him for more information
and asked, “Do you mean the color doesn’t match?” He replied that it wasn’t a color issue, but
rather the quality of the paint job.
When I looked closely at the hardtop and his vehicle, it was clear that
his vehicle's paint job had orange peel in it. I asked
him facetiously if he wanted us to start adding orange peel to our hardtops, but he
failed to see any humor in my comment.
And with that, the audit was complete and we had passed with more flying
colors! I don’t think I have ever been
more proud of a workforce than I was for my team.
With the successful customer audit behind us, our next order of
business was to develop an effective scheduling system that would guarantee
on-time delivery to our customers, while at the same time prevent us from
over-producing parts. In the past this
plant had measured and reported efficiencies as one of the key performance
metrics. We had learned from reading The Goal that this metric and other Cost
Accounting based metrics were taking us in the wrong direction. When I had arrived at this plant, there was
WIP stacked everywhere on both sides of our plant and as I looked into the
reason why, it was clear that by using efficiency as our primary metric, we had
over-produced on our non-constraint process steps. It was time to take a stand, so I instructed
my folks to only measure and report efficiency at the constraint.
Although our team considered a variety of
different scheduling systems, we finally decided to follow the lessons we had
learned in The Goal and implement at
least some form of Drum Buffer Rope (DBR). Drum-Buffer-Rope is TOC’s production application and is named after its 3
essential components; the drum or constraint or weakest link, the buffer or
material release duration, and the rope or release timing mechanism. I can tell you that we really didn’t know
what we were doing, but decided to push on with our implementation. We knew there would be mistakes made, but we
would learn from them and modify our solution as necessary. We
knew that our outcome would be a more robust and dependable scheduling process that
would allow us to produce more, with less inventory and better on-time delivery,
so we started our DBR effort.
To be continued........
Bob Sproull
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