My First Experience with TOC Part 2

 

That first day I spent all three shifts within the four walls of this factory, out on the production floor introducing myself to the employees and trying to get some sense of the true state of the business.  What I found that first day caused a great deal of anxiety for me personally because they were all looking to me for help save their jobs.  The next morning, in desperation, I visited the local library to find something, anything, on operation’s management to read.  That visit turned out to be a good move for me because in that library I discovered a small, partially hidden, paper-back book that would change the course of history at this plant in Kentucky.  This book would become my blue print for a complete transformation of not only this manufacturing facility, but for me personally and professionally.  The name of this book was The Goal – The Theory of Constraints – A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox.

I spent the remainder of my second day in my office and most of the night reading this manufacturing masterpiece.  There were many concepts within this book that I had never heard of before.  I was so excited to get started applying these concepts, but I knew my team had to understand the teachings within this book before we could truly begin our transformation.  I found a local book store and purchased copies of The Goal for all of my direct reports and supervisors to read.  I had the copies over-nighted and when they arrived, I mandated all of my direct reports to read this book in two days.  We had round-table discussions about the key teachings within this book on a daily basis and within a week we were ready to begin.

Back then, the key learning for my management team and myself was what Goldratt and Cox referred to as their Five Focusing steps.  The short-hand version of these five steps were:

·       Step 1: Identify the system constraint.

·       Step 2: Decide how to exploit the system constraint.

·       Step 3: Subordinate everything to the system constraint.

·       Step 4: If necessary, elevate the constraint, but don’t let inertia create a new  constraint.

·       Step 5: Return to Step 1 to identify the new system constraint.

One of the first things I felt we needed to do was to hold a meeting with all of our employees.  In this meeting I let everyone know that we had three months to turn our manufacturing facility around or we would be forced to close its doors.  I let everyone know that their opinions mattered and that it would take everyone participating in our turn-around to avoid closure.  The overall effect of having this meeting was that the two distinctly different camps of employees that had existed, in effect vanished immediately.  The bottom line was that nobody wanted to lose their jobs and the fact that we, as a management team, were willing to listen to their improvement ideas, struck a very positive chord with everyone in this meeting.

One of the first things we did was to establish a morning walk-though, which we referred to as a Herbie Hunt, to search for and find the system constraint.  Because we were losing so much money on the hardtop side of the business, we elected to start on that side of the plant.  Each morning, as a group, we would walk the process until we came upon a backlog of partially finished hardtops.  Once we found this backlog, we then stopped and asked the operator why he or she felt that the process was blocked at their station.  We also asked this same person what they thought should be done to alleviate the backlog.  This technique turned out to have multiple effects.  First, we were able to identify the system constraint and then get ideas on how to exploit it.  In the early going, it was clear that we had to subordinate the rest of the process to the pace of the constraint.  This was difficult because our corporate office tracked our overall efficiency and by asking the non-constraints to slow down, the overall efficiency took a nosedive.  The bottom line was that we needed to reduce the amount of work-in-process inventory.

Perhaps the most important effect of our daily Herbie Hunt was the true involvement of the hourly work force in our improvement effort.  They were amazed that someone was actually listening to them and that we not only solicited their ideas, but we implemented them exactly as stated, as long as no safety or customer rules were violated!  I remember one operator telling me that nobody had ever listened to the workforce before.  And so our improvement effort began….

TO BE CONTINUED