Senior management too often chooses to concentrate its efforts in other areas, leaving manufacturing partially or totally unintegrated. Too many corporate myopias and parochial views place manufacturers in a less than desirable competitive position.
The competitive challenge necessitates a new corporate attitude about the increased importance of World Class Manufacturing. This will cause senior management to view manufacturing with renewed importance as part of an integrated corporate strategy.
This renewed importance for manufacturing will require a better understanding of manufacturing strategy implications, tradeoffs, and manufacturing planning, execution, and control techniques to gain and maintain competitive advantage. We must also recognize that MRP, JIT, etc. by themselves are only a piece of the whole. A new perspective is needed. The old, and unfortunately some new, parochial views have caused many of us to be nearsighted and lose ground because of it. We have learned a hard lesson.
One of our greatest areas of vulnerability was in taking for granted that we knew how to apply our own manufacturing techniques, and we were so good at manufacturing that no one could beat us at our own game.
What must be understood by senior management is that planning, organizing, executing and controlling manufacturing resources is one of the key cornerstones to a profitable and dominant competitive position. In order to gain competitive superiority in a world economy, the development and implementation of an effective manufacturing strategy has become an essential, overriding mission for manufacturers.
Developing a highly competitive manufacturing strategy, as an integral part of an overall corporate strategy is a vital part of the management process as a company develops its instincts for Manufacturing Excellence.
Are You on THE RIGHT Track? You may be on the right track but please ensure that you don’t sit down on the track as you may be run over and end up not knowing what hit you.
Is your company firmly committed and involved with making Manufacturing Excellence an integral part of the management process?
After serious consideration, candid answers to the following 10 questions will help you benchmark how your organization is progressing toward the goal of Manufacturing Excellence. The scoring system is 10 points for yes and zero points for no answers. Nothing less than 100 points or 100% performance is really acceptable if Manufacturing Excellence is an integral part of your company's strategy for competitive advantage.
1) Do we have a formal, top management driven Sales and Operations Planning process for determining the capacity requirements, financial resources, cycle times, etc. to support anticipated customer demand?
2) Do we thoroughly understand that excess inventory masks operational and quality problems, making it difficult to identify the specific cause for correction?
3) Do we know the expected reduction in work-in-process and finished goods inventories from shorter cycle times?
4) Have we developed the mindset to constantly identify problems and immediately resolve them?
5) Are we working aggressively on the redesign of complicated products, which are difficult to manufacture because they have been over designed.
6) Does senior management thoroughly understands that they decide how important quality is and improvement begins from that point?
7) Have we calculated the production capacity increase from a 75% or more reduction in current changeover times?
8) Have we significantly reduced alternate sources of supply and made our primary vendors working partners?
9) Do our performance measurements stimulate improvement in the right direction?
10) Do we have a well conceived, documented action plan that has the organization focused on and aggressively working on the right issues?
