How good are your Performance Review Meetings?
July 27, 2009 by samirshah
Have you ever wondered……
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We have all the relevant performance reviews is place but I don’t know how effective they are?
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We review our downtime regularly but I am not sure that we are focussing in the correct areas?
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I am sure we can achieve more in the current performance reviews but I don’t know what I should be doing to make them better?
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I believe that some of the meetings we have are a waste of my time and I am not sure what I am supposed to contribute in them?
Regularly, we come across sites that have these questions and don’t know what to do about it. For this reason we have developed an audit criterion that focuses on meetings objectives and outcomes and identifies areas that are being performed well and highlights improvement opportunities.
The first thing we would advice a client to do is to list all the current performance review meetings they have on site with the relevant outcomes required, purpose for the meeting, attendees with their required contribution, meeting frequency and consequences for non-attendance. This highlights gaps where by the relevant attendees are not correct or it is not clear why the meeting is in place. In some cases we have found that the meetings were put in place historically due to an unknown reason and are not relevant anymore. By clearly defining the items mentioned above makes everyone aware of the reason for attending a certain meeting and what will be required from them. This ensures that an attendance to a meeting is not just a waste of time.
Once all your meetings are clearly defined and everyone who attends knows the reason why they are there, you should set up an audit structure that enables you to understand how well the meetings are achieving the desired outcomes. By forming a habit of having a meeting audit timetable, it will ensure that your meetings are continuously delivering a positive result and any revamp of a meeting can be carried out should the objectives outlined are not being achieved.
Some of the things we look out for in a meeting that has been clearly defined with a purpose and objectives to find out if it is achieving its desired outcomes is listed below:
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Was the meeting fully attended?
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If not, were there any consequences for non-attendance?
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Were actions from previous meeting reviewed for effectiveness?
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Were there any consequences for not completing actions within allocated time?
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Did the meeting run to time?
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Was the meeting focused on objectives at all times?
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Was accountability assigned to each of the actions?
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Were targets assigned to each of the actions?
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Was the meeting outputs documented in the relevant logs?
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Were the overall objectives of the meeting achieved?
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If further information was required, was it followed through to the area of the issue?
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Was there an action in place to resolve the root cause if different to actions assigned above?
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Did any coaching take place after the meeting? E.g. what went well and could be improved
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Intent of Review -Did the review contribute towards a positive effect on line performance?
We mark each of the relevant questions above in a meeting and give it a score with a quality and effectiveness rating for the meeting. This enables the meetings to be reviewed and feedback given to the facilitator of the meeting to make it better.
This is all part of the continuous improvement philosophy and helps you keep track of all the relevant reviews you have in place to improve performance. If the performance reviews are not effective, your improvement efforts will be limited to the quality of these reviews.
We have several of these performance tools that can help you identify areas of improvement and enables you to progressively move forward. If you would like to know more about these tools, please get in touch and find out how we can help you achieve your desired outcomes.
Innovate or die? - the brink of a revolution
January 10, 2009 by adrianpask
I’ve just been reading an article in the Food Manufacturer (Rick Pendrous, 02/01/09) in which he claims that supermarkets such as Tesco are allegedly seeking as much as a 5% price drop off products such as ready meals and other core products.
The article states “Tesco are very demanding,” said one chilled food supplier that was asked to cut its prices. “We will end up very wounded indeed.”
Are you reading this and thinking similarly? Perhaps you are already being challenged on your costs and have made the first step of laying off your temporary labour, but still being requested to hit targets and improve efficiencies. If this is the case then news that the supermarkets are going to be challenging your sales teams for further price cuts….which you are likely to be requested to deliver.
In my opinion this leaves many manufacturers with a choice: Innovate (And improve). Or die.
In my belief this environment could well lead UK manufacturing into a new era of innovation. Over the next 12-36 months i believe we will some of the things we will experience are:
- Greater demands for output
- Greater constraints on labour costs
- Greater focus on ROI
- Pressure from retaillers to drop cost
- Greater constraints on capital expenditure
Resulting in:
- Any sites that act too slowely will be shut
- Any sites that choose not to act will be shut
- Major changes for the sites that want to survive
If you want to survive expect:
- Change. Lots and lots of change
- A resurgence in lean and CI implementation
- More continuous improvement projects being implemented
- Greater focus on KPI’s and numerical performance
- Greater emphasis on improvement
- Individuals held more accountable for delivering change rather than just ‘doing the day job’
- People management skills will be at a premium
- Your site will introduce improvement projects with greater emphasis on internal team delivery
- To be involved with consultants and CI experts to support projects
If you’re slow adopting these changes my belief is that times will get very difficult…and you may not last the year, or even the next 6 months.
Many of us will have heard of “The Toyota Way” of production, when will you start to create “Your way”, and what will it contain?
The end result? I believe we are on the brink of a CI revolution in the UK. I believe that over the next 3 years we may well witness if not some new techniques, then some new ways of applying age-old techniques. I can’t wait to be involved!!!
Using XL800 for Takt Time Analysis
November 30, 2008 by adrianpask
We recently had the pleasure of meeting a team who wanted a way of preventing their Continuous Improvement Manager from spending hours with a stop watch and a unit counter on a gantry counting units on the line to identify a minor stop issue. Well….5 mins of configuration later this is the example we have created.
So - how can you use an XL800 as a portable Continuous Improvement Manager?
What we did was set the board with a desired takt time (which in this example is 1s).
We then said that:
- any cycle that’s 1s + 5% is a “slow cycle”
- any cycle that’s 1s + 25% is a “small stop”,
- anything that’s 1s + 200% is a “major stop”.
You can set these values to any numbers that you want to really tune the board to get what you want.
This then gives us the KPI screen below….which could suddenly give your Continuous Improvement Manager hours and hours of time to work on improvement projects rather than counting product!
When you decide to get an XL we can even make sure that this setup is included in your basic configuration file so you can use the system to add value straight out of the box.
