Helping Improve Manufacturing Performance

Manufacturing Excellence

Firstly, apologies; I know this will not be you and your company, but you might find it illuminating!

My experience of working with manufacturing companies in the West is that they do not understand excellence.

For most companies, excellence is about achieving, or slightly exceeding the budgetary expectations.

Excellence in the West is about directing indirect spend on projects that are sponsored by senior management an that have a minimum, corporately set ROCE. It is about doing the minimum, for the biggest return. AND WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT?

During my time in Japan I have seen a world class company that has fully automated lines, and has retained the operators, to work on improvements, because having consistently achieved >98% OEE they moved their performance measure to MTBT (how long the line operates without human intervention). I have also seen anther company, with OEE >97%, who changed the performance measure so that they could measure big losses because they said that reducing 50% loss was easier than reducing a 3% loss.

These companies achieve high profits because they do the right things, they cultivate loss elimination, not loss reduction.