As global competition squeezes company profit margins, ensuring manufacturing processes are well-tuned for cost and quality performance is essential.\u00a0 Equipment must be fully utilized to maximize return on capital investments and production quality issues must be resolved quickly to ensure full realization of potential revenue from customers.\u00a0 In the past when companies performed most of the steps themselves to transform raw materials into finished goods, resolving problems and optimizing performance could be handled by the company\u2019s internal problem management process.<\/p>\n
Improvements in transportation efficiency and nearly frictionless information flow among companies in the manufacturing value chain over the past 2 decades have not only made it possible, but in many cases essential, for companies to take on more focused and specialized roles and increase their leverage of 3rd<\/sup> party suppliers and partners for other activities.\u00a0 The manufacturing eco-system approach enables greater leverage of economies of scale, deeper specialization and in many cases greater cost performance than vertically integrated business models.\u00a0 Partner eco-systems are great when things work well, but what happens when there is a problem?<\/p>\n Companies are finding that as their business models become more complex, a purely internal approach to manufacturing problem solving is rapidly losing effectiveness.\u00a0 What these companies are learning is that the future of manufacturing problem solving is becoming a collaborative team sport.<\/p>\n The future of problem solving in manufacturing will involve 4 key elements:<\/p>\n 1. Subject Matter Experts who understand the various components of the manufacturing process and how they interact with each other to generate overall results.\u00a0 As processes cross companies, this will often be a group of SMEs coming together to provide coverage of the big picture.<\/p>\n 2. Visibility to holistic and accurate data about how the overall process is performing in order to diagnose issues.\u00a0 Treating the activities of each company as a black box and only having visibility to the interfaces may be fine for normal day-to-day operations, but problem solving requires an additional level of data transparency in order to effectively identify the root cause of issues.<\/p>\n 3. A consistent and coordinated process across eco-system partners to diagnose problems, identify alternatives and implement change.\u00a0 A team is only as strong as its weakest player and only effective as their ability to work together. Problem solving skills and processes must span the partner ecosystem in order for the problem management process to be effective.<\/p>\n 4. Clear decision-making authority \u2013 often alternatives will have costs, benefits and impacts that are un-even across companies and trade-off decisions are inevitable. The individual or group with decision making authority needs to be clearly defined.<\/p>\n Implementing these elements into your company\u2019s manufacturing eco-system environment will require some changes to skills, processes, operational data management and cross-company decision making roles.\u00a0 A common question from many companies seeing the need for change is identifying where to start.<\/p>\n A good first step for most companies is focusing on people and skill training.\u00a0 By developing a consistent understanding about the problem-solving process, SMEs from across the eco-system will have a common foundation to collaborate with each other and understand the role that each individual plays as a part of the problem-solving process.\u00a0 Even if visibility to end-to-end data is not available across companies, problem solving SMEs will understand what information others need and be better prepared to provide it.<\/p>\n The focus on people must also extend beyond the SMEs to the decision makers as well.\u00a0 Each company has a primary responsibility to create value for their individual stakeholders.\u00a0 Developing a clear common understanding of how cross-company decision making will take place and where authority resides is essential to translating recommendations from problem-solving SMEs into business results.\u00a0 Depending on the structure and formality of the eco-system environment (things like regulatory requirements, contractual obligations, and industry dynamics), developing a shared decision-making process may be as simple as a facilitated training\/workshop or it may require written contractual agreements amongst all companies involved in the manufacturing value chain.<\/p>\n As the manufacturing environment evolves and involves a more complex web of specialized companies contributing to the transformation of raw materials into finished goods, problem solving is becoming a more collaborative team activity.\u00a0 The future of problem-solving in manufacturing has some key elements that will need to be developed and matured over time, however the first place to start is with providing people the skills and training they need to be effective in this new environment.\u00a0 Kepner-Tregoe has been helping companies develop and mature problem-solving skills for over 50 years through training, process implementation and facilitation services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As global competition squeezes company profit margins, ensuring manufacturing processes are well-tuned for cost and quality performance is essential.\u00a0 Equipment must be fully utilized to maximize return on capital investments and production quality issues must be resolved quickly to ensure full realization of potential revenue from customers.\u00a0 In the past when companies performed most of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":562,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[163],"class_list":["post-25136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n