Team leaders

    A few years back, our CFO visited our facility as part of his yearly plan to personally see an operation, something I found refreshing in many ways. We were exposed to a different point of views we never considered.

We started a Lean journey a few years back, and the financial results started to show the progress and the effectiveness of the culture change. At that point the facility was a real showcase starting from the simple cleanliness, organization and visuals. The machines were spotless, fully operational, and free of temporary fixes and other visible inconvenience. 

Not obvious to the naked eye was the culture around Safety and Quality, on the other hand the Delivery and Cost were a result of the first two; something difficult to understand at first glance. Let me explain, because our Safety was improved tremendously in the last two years, the potential for new first aids or near misses was removed for the most part from the assembly process; a lot more opportunities for improvement remain but the operation was very stable. Something similar happened with the Quality of our products; that year we end up producing 1.3M units at 27 ppm or 27 defects per million units, it was pretty good. So the facility was at rate and producing without stopping any customers, so the delivery was top-notch and by definition the cost was according to the plan.

During our walkthrough, he noticed a person standing behind one of the team members. we stopped, watch, and watch and watch until he turned around and said "What is he doing?", I smiled and said "He is watching the standardize work", and he said, "Yes, but what is he doing?". Knowing exactly where he was going, I said, "He is one of our seven team leaders in the facility, one per line, he is only training our people, watching standardize work and problem solving". Then he said "So, he is not moving parts, assembling parts or doing anything to our products", and I said "No, his job is just to do the three things I just mentioned".

His innate ability to quickly perform a mental calculation of hourly rate with 2080 hours per year multiplied by seven lines and three shifts created a priceless look on his face. I was not expecting his next question, but he asked me "Who approved this?"... My answer was... "The added cost of labor was not significant compared to the amount saved in overtime, training, expedites, scrap and rework. All of those expenses added is saving 4% of the total revenue year over year". While it seems low, the real impact was reflected on how the operation ran and the little effort we needed to put every day on the tactical side, we spent a lot of our time developing strategic plans, so we can move the operation to the next level of performance.

Imagine an operation where the people follows a set of work instructions, not tribal knowledge. where the people is officially documented cross-train in other lines, the daily operation does not require a "hot list" to run, and the production planning is created by the forklift drivers based on finish good inventory levels.

Again, not obvious to the naked eye. The real reason for the existence of the Team leader with only three tasks in their job description, is because the workload and accountability of the shift was divided and owned by the people on every product. They had the power to shutdown their production line for any valid reason, Safety was a no brainer, Quality was understood and supported by standards and if needed, by requesting additional testing to the quality department, but at the end of the day, they (and their team) were encourage and responsible for the quality and delivery of their product.

We added one more task a few years later, just because the goal of reducing scrap was reduced for financial reasons. While the quality was not at risk, the decision to stop the process was a little relaxed. By adding the responsibility of being the only ones allowed to remove the scrap from the lines, this created a faster response when something was wrong with any of the machines. This responsibility changed the attention to detail to their machines and they were more involved in the maintenance and repair of their equipment, removing the scrap was a tough physical task and they couldn't leave it or extended to the next shift, so... they got smart and involve themselves with maintenance; great step of improvement.

Just in case you wonder, this process took us a couple of years to define and replicate, it's not easy because being the leader of a process/product is not just getting a dollar more per hour, some people have no skill to lead and deal with people, others have no ability to dissect a problem, slice-it in small pieces to fix the broken area, and put it back together again. The way to start a process like this, is to select one process from top-to-bottom, figure out the metrics and tweak the metrics again and again, until the data on the board is meaningful to the people, so they can change and improve by themselves. Then define and document the work, so it becomes standardize. Train the crew based on the documentation and cycle time the process every day.  And last but not least, be very active solving problems every day... once the team can master this, and the process is stable not just for a couple of days or weeks...replicate, replicate!