Weekly Supplier Reviews

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Communicating with suppliers can be a challenge for any organization.  If the supplier is local to the operation, then it is easy to communicate on a weekly if not daily basis.  Simply travel the short distance to the suppliers base of operations or have them travel  to your home base.  It's best if you have the one on one communication to build trust and get to know each other personally.  This helps the partnership flourish.

However most of the time the distance between operation and their suppliers is too great to travel frequently.  So you have to resort to scheduled phone calls (telecoms) or a video conference. Most likely it will be by phone.  With time differences of 3 hours or more, it becomes a challenge to coordinate schedule times, often with one party calling in from home or early in the morning.

Some important points to remember when setting meetings up with suppliers:

1. Ensure that one person is in charge of setting up the telecoms and has appropriate call-in numbers to ensure that the meeting will start on time and everyone is present.  It is maddening when some people have incorrect or outdated information and valuable time is lost.
2. Have an agenda available in advance and follow it.  The meeting leader's primary task is to keep everyone speaking to agenda items and not going off on a tangent.
3. Assign action items to anyone and have a completion date agreed to.  Once the completion date arrives check with the parties involved to determine if all items are complete.
4. If action items aren't completed, don't keep extending dates endlessly. You may have to set up a separate meeting to close the item.   Additionally you may have to involve management to help close the issue without further delay.

Video teleconferencing can provide face to face communication essential for a good supplier relationship
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Prototype Shop

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When you need quick turnaround for manufacturing operation it is often impossible in the normal flow of operations.  You may have experienced a delay in materials, a last minute design or repair change that necessitates the urgency of accelerating a part through the manufacturing process.  That is why you need a prototyping shop.

At Boeing it was referred to as "blue streak" shop named after its color code in the manufacturing operation.  The shop was usually a small area in the factory that had small drill presses, lathes, and other required equipment that could do 1 -2 small jobs at a time in a hurry.  The machinist or mechanic in the blue streak shop was an experienced person with at least 20 -25 years experience.  This was helpful not only for utilizing his or her machining skills attained during that period, but also to tap into how to best plan and execute a machining operation in fast order.

Utilizing experienced, skilled machinists can help you in a time of crisis
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Granted smaller companies may not have the luxury of dedicating their top machinist to a prototyping shop.  But with careful planning and coordination, an urgent job can be seamlessly scheduled within everyday operations so as not to disrupt the entire operation.

Peer Reviews

You may think your operation is going great with only a few tweaks here and there to keep it going.  Or worse you may be under the illusion, the operation is fine and you want to spend your time looking at more emergent issues.  Still you might even be at a loss to how to improve your operation to begin with.  For these reasons you need a peer review.

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A peer review is nothing more than having fresh sets of eyes review your process and provide constructive (hopefully) feedback which you can use to improve your business.  For a large company it is easy to do this since it is likely there are other internal groups that perform the same task.  It is easy to set up since companies always like their employees to help each other.

For a smaller company, you may have to reach out to a similar size company in the same type of industry (i.e. IT, manufacturing, health care, etc).  Of course you won't look towards a competitor but a company that has successfully solved similar issues in the past.  

Set up a two or three day review of what aspect of your operation needs help.  It's best to have older experienced reviewers who have a wealth of experience that can help guide you.  Invite them over to your place of business and use a catered lunch as incentive!  Once they arrive have a kickoff meeting to let everyone know what the objectives are.  If you carefully select the right people to review your operation, then the feedback will be invaluable.

You can escort them around the factory or let them explore on their own.  After the designated review time is complete, the reviewers should be happy to share their observations.  It may be difficult to listen to problems they may identify, but remember it is in the best interest of your company to improve. Sometimes it takes someone not so close to the business to improve it.

Peer reviews are essential in any operations
(Courtesy www.employeereview.com)

Self-Directed Work Teams

(Courtesy of www.blog.commlabinda.com)

In an earlier post I discussed integrated product teams which are cross-functional teams composed of members of different  skill sets all focused on developing a product or improving a process.  Another kind of effective team is the self-directed work team.  A self-directed work team may be cross-functional in membership.  Or it may contain mostly members from a single functional group or organization.

A self-directed work team is a team which can operate autonomously to identify problems or areas needing improvement, outline plans to solve the issue, and proceed to implement the plans to a successful conclusion.  These teams do not require constant monitoring by management.  If fact they perform much better if management "stays out of the way".  It's not to say management should not be briefed on what the group is doing and a timeline for completion  - they should be aware.  It's really a fact that a self-directed team knows how to work without being told what to do.

One of the teams I worked on at Boeing was a self-directed tooling team that solved various tooling issues related to F-22 fighter airplane manufacturing.  It was a team made of experienced design engineers as well as new engineers out of college.  They common thread was that everyone on that team wanted to make the program better and worked hard to reduce costs, improve flow, and steam line operations.

One incentive to encouraging aspirations to developing a self directed work team is to set up standards for different levels to work teams.  Start at criteria for a  Level 1 self-directed work team and list completion criteria for this level.  Keep going up to say a Level 4 which would be the most complete and autonomous work team.  Provide incentives to teams to reach a Level 4 and you will find that more employees will work to improve their effort without a lot of management oversight.

A good article on self-directed work teams is here:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/magazine/1995/nov/article/self-directed-work-teams-competitive-advantage.html#

 A self-directed work team working an issue
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