Same team: Different behavior. Different result?

Instead of going down the same road as almost any other pharma firm when it comes to manufacturing practices to improve efficiency and performance levels, Chris Ellins offers an attractive alternative: transform the team’s behavior.

“By starting with each operating team and radiating outward every aspect of a business can be examined and standardised within 12 to 16 weeks.”
-Chris Ellins

For the past 24 months we have been working with one of the world's largest healthcare manufacturers to create a standard deployment methodology that has enabled each of its 47 plants worldwide to engage their operating teams, transform day to day behaviour and enjoy new levels of sustainable performance.

Our client's ambition was not to deploy lean manufacturing or Six Sigma per se, but instead to establish a code of common behaviours that would enable every factory team around the world to own, standardise and then improve day-to-day performance meaningfully. Plants were located in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, the Far East and China.

Our challenge has been to design an action learning based program that can be embraced by any facility worldwide, is sophisticated enough to accommodate differences in plants, peoples and process but is sufficiently generic to enable meaningful benchmarking and the emergence of a global way of working. The methodology that has emerged requires nine months to bring a plant of any maturity up to a common standard and 24 months to achieve world-class levels of operational performance.

This deployment system is made up of seven standard components: Five Year Vision, Deployment Roadmap, Zoning, SQCDME/SIM, PSG, Standard Work and Rolling Sufficiency Planning.

Component 1: Five-Year Vision - Kicks off with a review of market trends, the business unit strategy, in country industrial plans and the requirements for the individual site. From the review the opportunities and threats to the plants are highlighted and within this context the factories current strengths and weaknesses identified.

Working together with the regional leadership team, the local operating team then translate each opportunity into a set of operational requirements and enabling investments and consider the merits and challenges of each.

Having made their choices and celebrated their decision, the Operations Team then decide how performance in such a plant will be measured. By exploring safety, quality, cost, delivery, moral and the environment the teams get the opportunity to imagine and then define how they want their future plant to be, how performance will be measured, how people will behave and the level of performance required to enable the business needs to be realised.

Once the vision of the plant's performance has been established the next challenge for the operations team is to create a vision for the enabling structures of their future state bottom up. What will the operator of five years' time looks like? What technical skills and knowledge will operators need to master and maintain? What processes will be required and who in the organization will execute them? In what way will operating teams be supported and how ought that support be organized? How should the performance of the teams and the supporting organization be measured and what transitory organisations will be necessary to develop and execute the improvement of people, plant, product and process?

By the end of this process teams have created clarity and shared ownership. Powerful paradigms that have lain out of sight are revealed and consciously abandon.

Component 2: The System Deployment Roadmap - Having invested a few days in the creation of five year plans it is essential that the site team climb into the detail of deploying zoning, SQCDME, SIM, PSG and standard work. This process is fast and practical, and provides an immediate method of bringing the first year of a site's five year plan to life. A detailed one-year activity and resource plan takes a few days to pull together, ensuring no more than a week has elapsed before the first zoning activity commences.

Component 3: Zoning - Enables every area of an organization to be owned and zoned. Zones are geographic areas of a business, within which all activities, standards and levels of performance are owned by the zone leader and the zone team. The process of identifying zones enables an organisation to consider where zonal boundaries are best drawn, which activities should be retained and which are redundant, how zones should be synchronized and how work, the work place and performance within each should be standardised and visualized. By starting with each operating team and radiating outward every aspect of a business can be examined and standardised within 12 to 16 weeks. This process can be achieved in the absence of a five year vision, but combined the effect is often dramatic.

Component 4: SQCDME and SIM - The next challenge is to enable each zone to establish and master Short Interval Management (SIM). SIM is the key enabler to the creation of superior performance and is the capability that most organizations have either never heard of, or have neglected.

SIM is made up of four elements. SIM One enables every operator, every hour, to identify and correct abnormality, or when this is not possible, to call upon additional support in real time. SIM Two enables a zone leader to support each operator throughout their shift to return at least 80 percent of all non-standard conditions back to standard before the shift end. SIM Three enables the supporting functions every day to identify abnormality beyond the zone teams capability to recognize or address and then synchronizes the actions necessary to minimise loss and risk across all supporting teams. SIM Four enables the identification of repetitive or persistent abnormalities and ensures appropriate resource is assigned to the identification and permanent elimination of root causes.

Deployed correctly SIM enables agility, aligning operating teams and their supporting functions to common goals and priorities.

Component 5: Problem-solving Groups - Enable zone teams to acquire the rigor and support to remove systemic obstacles to improvement. PSG's follow a standard A3 format and are reviewed, resourced and prioritized each week during SIM Four. PSG's are launched on a one in-one out basis and are essential vehicles for teams to master robust Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles and to break the habit of Plan-Do-Re do.

Component 6: Robust Standardized Work - Goes far beyond the traditional scope of a visual SOP or OPL. A program of standard work deployment generates learning pathways for each and every employee and enables appropriate skills, knowledge and behaviour to be profiled, trained in the classroom, coached in the work place, eventually mastered and ultimately certified only when performed On Time To Standard (OTTS).

Operating, cleaning, changing over, maintaining, quality assurance, SIM, and PSG's, all require executing with mastery if operational standards are to be maintained and improved sustainably.

Component 7: Rolling Sufficiency Planning - Enables operating teams to assure the sufficiency of their improvement plans, the sufficiency of their project execution and the sufficiency of their results. It is a simple yet powerful process of linking activity to outcomes and assures operating teams undertake just the right amount of work at just the right time to meet their budgets and their five year plans.

Learning & reflections: The adoption of the zone as the scalable unit has enabled large and small plants to embrace the system successfully. Cultural sensitivities have proven irrelevant in those sites where the plant director has led from the front. Twelve percent per annum productivity improvement seems the norm with quality losses and accidents dropping to near zero.

The system is not yet perfect but improving on an improvement is our raison d'être.

About

Chris Ellins and Total Flow, the organisation he founded in 2005, are regarded as innovators in the world of lean enterprise. Chris is regarded as an expert in customer value creation, end-to-end value streams, the elimination of systemic waste and the realisation of waste free production systems.