When to coach and when to take control?
May 31, 2010 by adrianpask
Here’s an interesting question - “Can you implement a new process without telling people what to do?”
This question was specifically asked in a discussion around how to create the processes necessary to drive OEE in a factory. Specifically carrying out tactical OEE reviews using our LineView system.
I think it’s possible to get long term change through great leadership, and all great leaders have a time when they’re very directive and also know when to change that behaviour to be supportive. When they are directive it’s done in a way that creates certainty and safety to grow rather than fear and superiority.
For me there are 2 elements to the answer of this question:
- When to direct/coach/delegate to develop skill: refer to Blanchard’s Situational Leadership model
- How that approach comes across to the team – the energy that you show up with when directing/coaching
When to be directive: If we refer to the two right hand boxes of Blanchard’s leadership model below:
1. When an individual is low competence, D1, (not carried out this task before) then you can’t coach them on how to get better as they don’t have the basics. Therefore the role of the leader is to be extremely clear about the what, how, and why for the process to build initial skill. E.g. if you wanted to teach me to snowboard you can’t be non-directive in your teaching as I’ve never done it before, I need to be told how to stop/start/fall/use the lifts.
2. When I start to develop some competence and base ability you can then start to take a step back to coach and develop and to be less directive and tell. The coaching phase. A great leader is still very directive about the what and very supportive over the how but ultimately decisions sit with the leader.
How to be directive:
1. When implementing a new process, initially it needs to be very tell to get them started. The tell is around what they will do, how they will do it, when they will do it, and to a great extent on the why they will do it.
2. This tell could be done from a world of “I’m great I know everything you must do what I say”…..which will get resistance in most cases, especially if we have some negative associations with being taught “school-style”.
3. This tell could be done from a world of “here’s a way that I know will help you get the results that you want, let me show you how it works”…..which will get a different level of response
My goal when implementing change is to be very clear and directive in a way that feel supportive and helpful whilst also creating a massive need to implement.
Institute of Leadership and Management Endorsement
May 18, 2010 by adrianpask
I’ll start this blog with an apology as i’m purely announcing something that we’re really pleased about rather than talking about OEE!
Hot off the press - over the last year our team have been pulling together a leadership programme specifically targeted to help Operations professionals get even better results. We’re delighted to announce that this week the programme was endorsed by The Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM).
How often to Middle and Senior manufacturing managers get really great quality practical, hands on training and coaching support that they can implement immediately to improve performance? We believe that we’ve found an answer to this and are delighted to have it independently verified.
More news to follow soon…..!
Breaking news!
April 12, 2010 by adrianpask
How often do you need to know your OEE or production numbers?
Daily?
Hourly?
Weekly?
Just read this great post by Seth Godin in which he asks “Does knowing about something ten seconds or ten minutes faster really matter? Is it worth the adrenalin?”
I suppose it depends on how many units per minute you’re running at!
- What frequency do you need to know your OEE numbers?
- Or more importantly your OEE Loss?
- What about your operators?
- Your front line managers?
- Your senior management?
How much time is spent gathering data manually when you want it at your fingertips in real time all the time?
Having instantly breaking data is essential in our world as every minute lost might be another 2000 units that have not been made.
But how do you get the right instant OEE data to the right people at the right time?
Call us and we’ll help you to achieve this!!!
Leading OEE from the front
April 12, 2010 by adrianpask
Randomly i was just drawn onto the BT website to sort out my phone bill and i came across an article on leadership that resonated with me and from which i’ve lifted the first paragraph below:
“Let’s be clear – leading is different from managing. Leaders have a vision of what the company could be – its ethos, brand image and place in the market; they set the direction, steer a course and inspire others to share the belief. Managers help realise the vision, directing staff and operations; they measure and control resources as well as establishing plans, rules and timescales. Of course, managers encourage and motivate too, and some people can both manage and lead” - From BT Business Insight Articles
I’m wondering how do great leaders cascade their vision throughout their teams on a really practical daily basis? In my mind a great leader not only sets the vision, they live it every day and show by example that they understand the intricacies of being aligned to a common goal.
Consider a business that wants to drive performance using OEE and tactical reviews. Quite often we see a great emphasis on documenting, clarifying, and standardising meetings at Non Management, Junior Management, and Middle Management level. If these guys are meeting every 4hr we’d better make the process optimised and efficient so let’s write down what we want them to do and then audit against the documentation. Let’s ensure that all these meetings are highly effective with great quality and impact to our business (sound familiar?).
As we go up through the organisation we tend to see this attention to structure and repeatability weaken until we see Senior Managers carrying out review meetings without an agenda, minutes, or any rating for effectiveness or quality.
Let me ask a couple of questions -
- Are senior managers intrinsically more structured, disciplined, and aligned than a junior or middle management team?
- At senior manager level what is the potential impact on the organisation for each decision made?
- What message does a leadership team give to the rest of the organisation if they insist on structure and discipline that they don’t themselves adhere to?
Leading is different from managing. Great leaders don’t just set the vision, they live it every day. A manager may insist that a team follows a specific structure to get the most from their day, a great leader brings that team into their own daily routines and leads by example. Imagine taking a group of junior managers into a board review in which they see the same documentation, the same structure, and comparable outputs to their tactical review meetings.
Surely it makes sense that if i want my team to perform in a standardised, structured, disciplined, and repeatable manner then the first person i need to change is me?
What disciplines around OEE leadership do you demonstrate each and every day?
The Benefit of the doubt?
November 22, 2009 by adrianpask
I’ve just been going through my RSS feeds for this week and saw this great blog entry from Seth Godin about how we deal with instances when we misunderstand the communication from a friend versus a stranger:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/11/benefit-of-the-doubt.html
This got me thinking about where else we give the benefit of the doubt rather than probing and prodding below the surface to really understand what causes us to get the results that we’re getting.
For example - How often in your production meetings do you give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt when discussing factory performance? When discussing improvement initiatives? When discussing capital investment? When discussing OEE performance? When carrying out 1-2-1 reviews?
We frequently observe that factory decision making can based on production loss information which can be as low a 33% accurate…and we see teams taking this at face value, working hard, and wondering why performance is flat or sliding backwards.
Let me offer a motto that i personally use everytime i walk into a site: “Seek to Understand before being Understood“.
Next time you have a production meeting seek to understand where the data comes from, how accurate it is, what possible errors it may have, and therefore how effective it has been for guiding your actions.
Understand the challenges that your team face, and their teams. If you don’t do this, who else will?
Calculating OEE for a factory
November 20, 2009 by adrianpask
So when you have multiple production lines how do you calculate your oee?
Here’s a great question that was asked to the experts at www.themanufacturer.com:
This article does a great job of examining how OEE can be applied as a benchmarking tool or as a diagnostic tool and in essence recommends that it’s not a good measure for benchmarking your facility. Whilst i personally agree with the sentiment to an extent of this i would like to add an additional thought:
- When we carry out factory benchmarking, which we do at least three times a month, we still find it useful to look at the OEE of the multiple lines on the site to identify relative priority. Do you work on line 1 or line 3 in your site? Or when you have multiple sites with multiple lines again where do you focus?
- When we do this we take each line as an individual entity and then identify the % contribution to the profitablity of the site. This gives us a weighted contribution of that line to the business.
- We then take the OEE for each line and ask - if we improve OEE by 5% what is the profit contribution to that line?
This instantly gives us a relatively real way of linking OEE improvement across sites and networks in a meaningful way. Typically this also challenges some interesting assumptions about how people are currently spending their time. Of course it doesn’t take into account business criticality….but that’s an email for another day!
Getting results with action
September 13, 2009 by adrianpask
The improvement of production performance is achieved through the combination of great quality data, robust management review, and the application of operator and technical skills and experience.
Therefore: I.F. you ACT you get RESULTS
Whereby (Information x Focus) x Actions = Results
The formulae suggests:
Inaccurate information = poor results
Inadequate focus = poor result
Low no. of decisions / actions = poor results
If you act you get results
Defining what you really want:
Information = Using XL800 at a tactical level – understanding the real root cause of your biggest losses
Focus = Man hours focusing on information that lead to decision making – or number of tactical performance reviews combined with the number of people involved
Actions = Commitment to a high number of speedily executed mix of maintaining, proactive (changing) and updating actions
MANAGE AND MEASURE THE INPUTS AND THE RESULTS ARE GUARANTEED!
Measuring the inputs:
Information – number of top losses identified that are effecting OEE and getting to the root causes
Focus – number of tactical and strategic reviews taking place and the number of relevant individuals involved
Actions – the number of type 1, 2 and 3 actions taking place
When these three areas are aligned then Results are inevitable. The data could be collected manually at the end of each shift and put into Excel (or similar), however the ultimate, is to have electronically collected pinpoint accurate data that is available in real time, from each machine. This data can then be analysed and displayed on the shop floor, in team meeting rooms, in fact anywhere in the manufacturing facility.
Updated introduction to XL800 OEE System
June 8, 2009 by adrianpask
We’re delighted to announce that we’ve now released a whole batch of additional functionality for our XL800 OEE System….and the great news is that we’re making this update available to all customers completely free of charge.
With our new update you can:
1. View all your XL800 OEE Systems in a unique Factory Dashboard - you will be able to instantly see which lines/machines need your instant attention.
2. Capture detailed fault diagnostics - using our new visual “Total Production Timeline” not only will you see what downtime you’ve had, you’ll be able to see when it happened and what it cost you
3. Detailed fault analysis - with our integrated pareto analysis tools you will instantly be able to see your top reasons for downtime today, yesterday, this month, last month at the touch of a button.
View these features and more:
Is OEE the right measure for you?
May 26, 2009 by adrianpask
I recently contributed to a post on OEE measurement on Lean.org from a guy asking if OEE is the measure for his bespoke manufacutring plant. Having posted it i think it’s worth posting here as well:
Here’s a thought for you - OEE is a great metric for an process in which equipment is the constraint. You can tell this from the way that the 6 losses/3 losses of OEE are all based on equipment performance.
At this point i would like to ask you a question - what is the constraint in your manufacturing process?
I.e. if you want to increase output what is the first thing that you change - do hire more people to run more machines, do you buy more raw materials, do you book more outgoing vehicles, do you reduce changeovers, do your increase machine running time? You can find this out be asking a random selection of people - “what do we need to do to produce more parts?”
Based on my experience in similar environments to yours equipment performance is very rarely the bottleneck in the process; it’s typically human related. I.e when we bring in more people we make more product. In this instance the best metric is something human related - a productivity Man hours/tonne type measure with OEE as a secondary driver on specific machines.
I’m not saying don’t use OEE, i’m saying make sure that your primary measure causes you to optimise your bottleneck. I was in a packing environment with 30yr old machines a while ago where they have 200% capacity and were measuring OEE. To get OEE up they were running 1/2 their machines as hard as possible whilst the others were stopped. Due to the age of the machines this meant huge amounts of maintenance was needed to keep the machines running and lots of labour to keep them going. By moving to a productivity measure we now run all the machines at 40% OEE with the same number of staff. Our cost per tonne has gone down and our poor old machines aren’t being thrashed to bits.
Pick a measure that measures your constraint. Use OEE only when equipment is your constraint.
Here’s an idea - if you want to measure productivity then it’s possible to program your XL800 OEE system with a productivity constant. This will enable it to display a real time “£/Unit” or “Man hour/Tonne” type measure on your factory floor. OEE is only the starting point!
Choosing an OEE system
April 30, 2009 by adrianpask
I’ve recently been following the Elsmar.com Forum for manufacturing improvement and there’s a post on there asking what to consider for an OEE data capture system. Having spent some time responding i’ve decided to be lean and use the same content on my blog! Let me know what you think!
Oh a quick thought (i’m writing this after finishing everything else!) - here’s an idea of what an OEE system should be: “A good data capture system is simply a robust resource allocation tool”. Whatever you do it should lead directly to people doing something differently as a result of using the data. Now you can probably ignore everything else i’ve written below…and feel free to read on!
If i may offer some advice it would be in the following areas:
1. Identify where the constraint is in your process
2. Identify the measure that not only tells you the extent of the constraint, but what the contributing factors to loss are
3. Understand the metric, automate it and train people thoroughly. Get their buy in and support.
4. Establish a robust management review methodology based on the metric - hence the need for automation; an automated process frees up your management team to fix the losses not spend all their time calculating them.
1. Identify the constraint:
If i may offer some advice it would be to help identify what your objective for recording the data might be. Whatever you choose to record i would recommend that it measures the constraint in your manufacturing process. If your constraint is a mechanical one - i.e. to produce more produce you just need to run a machine more/get less stops then OEE is a great measure for you. If however, your constraint is relieved by hiring more people, or more generally your constraint is labour based then i would steer you towards more of a man hour / tonne type metric. By the way an XL800 System can measure both very easily - how would you like a real time £/tonne measure displayed on the factory floor?
2. The correct measure:
The value to OEE is not that you get an OEE number. You’ve made what you’ve made - there’s little point in reviewing it. I visit so many sites that can tell me their OEE but can’t tell me where their losses are. The value to measuring OEE is in the categorisation of loss. If you know the loss you can apply the right tool to fix.
E.g. for OEE:
3 Loss: Quality, Performance, Availability
6 Loss: Speed, minor stops, major stops, quality in process, quality on startup, planned downtime.
If you have a planned downtime loss apply smed techniques. If you have a minor stop loss apply kaizan blitz techniques. The value is not the OEE number - it’s the collection and categorisation of the loss that counts!
3. Understand and train:
There are 2 main schools of thought on the collection of OEE data. One is the manual school that says it’s better for operators to collect so that they understand and you get the ‘real losses’. The other is the automated school that says it’s better to get the correct data and then work out the real losses later.
An automated system only ever tells you symptoms for your downtime - its diagnostics are only so good as the signals you give it. That said, how often has an operator identified the real root cause for a stop - 9.9 times out of 10 they’ll note down a symptom.
My personal belief is that it’s better to use an automated system that captures your losses accurately…and then use management process and review to drill down. Manual data systems like the ones you’ve listed take a lot of work to maintain and i have yet to find one that’s accurate to >60% simply due to the nature of human data capture.
Therefore i sit firmly in the second school and am capable of installing a system that correctly identifies loss on canning/bottling/packing lines running at >30,000units/hour to accuracies of over 98%.
The message here is again back to objectives - what do you want to achieve. Whichever root you choose involve your teams. I remember installing a system in a bottling plant in which the operator came up to me and said “this is crap, all crap. I’ll show you - i’ll find all the problems with your system”. It was brilliant! He was the best snagger i’ve ever met. I just took all his feedback and fixed it all. After a month he had to admit the system was good because he’d commissioned it for me! Now stop him from training everyone else on ‘his system’!
4. Robust process:
A system is ONLY so good as how it’s used. You could spend £10 or £180,000 on a system. If you don’t use it you’ll get the same result and the same payback.
We often support people to establish robust internal processes for using the data, documenting the actions that arise from interrogating the data, and then a management review process for driving change. Typically this looks as follows:
1. 24hr daily reviews - looking at 24hr data. Objective is to identify what actions are still open, see if we have any reoccurring issues, assign resource where needed.
2. 4hr Short Interval Control - a regular review (initially at 4 hr intervals, moving to 2) with front line management and engineers. 1st objective is to identify greatest loss from last window of time and ensure closed off. 2nd objective is to identify what needs to be done differently in the next window of time based on the data currently available.
3. A variety of strategic review - looking at trended data for maintenance, engineering, planning, forecasting etc.
Remember - your level of payback is directly related to how you use the data.
So what OEE system works? Whichever one you commit to using fully. My advice would be to look beyond a software download as i think you may struggle to use it fully simply as it’s reliant on manual data collection. That said, i’ve created and implemented several of these in the past on sites performing at between 25-40% OEE and got great results.
Also if you’re running at <45% my belief is that you don’t need to spend a fortune collecting data because you’re line is down for 4 hours in every 8. People know where the issues are because they’re in them! But when you head up into the 65%+ territory you’ll struggle to continue improving without robust automated data capture.
