Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesEXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The challenge: Align a newly merged manufacturing organization to a common way of doing business while meeting ongoing contractual obligations. Overcoming this challenge would require a journey based in the lean philosophy, Six Sigma, and a manufacturing excellence mode that defined positive behavior change. Suppose you worked at a company that had just completed complex mergers of four different companies into one. Let's say you were in charge of 3,000 employees in your manufacturing organization that interacted with 8,000 others in various program and functional organizations, and your task was to align the work of 23 factories into one smoothly operating lean process. To make things a little tougher, what if your employees were consolidated from different geographic locations from around the country (as a result of the mergers), with each employee bringing different processes, methods, tools, systems, and work cultures? And what if you discovered there were language differences--even though everyone spoke English? What if the strengths of each former company represented tremendous potential if they could be captured, hut in reality these strengths were slipping away? And don't forget that you still had to meet contractual production obligations to your customers while you were solving these problems.
The Raytheon Missile Systems manufacturing organization in Tucson, Ariz., faced exactly these challenges. Three years later, the organization was recognized with the Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Excellence in 2004 Curious how we did it?
The following story will give you the essentials of our change journey and what we did to make things better. Ours is not the only way to change and achieve improvements, but it is the story of what we did to align a large number of employees and organizations at Raytheon to achieve success in Tucson.
The journey
In a nutshell, the goal was to align an entire organization. The challenge was to do it while we were already in business. In a way, it was like rebuilding an airplane while it was flying.
The first step was to "Go get smart," as the operations manager said. A core team was formed consisting of five Raytheon Six Sigma experts from different parts of the organization. (Raytheon Six Sigma is the umbrella initiative launched by Raytheon to help transform tire entire corporation.)
The core team embarked on a learning expedition by benchmarking other companies to discover how they had overcome similar challenges. The core team also reviewed the rich histories of the companies now merged into Raytheon. The result was a mixed bag of critical concerns, activities, tools, models, and plans. The core team learned what worked and didn't work at other companies and what might work for us. The discovery was that Raytheon Missile Systems (RMS) operations needed to create a solution tailored to our own unique work culture and business challenges while leveraging the learning and wisdom of others. In short, we needed to use what we learned to build the change model that would work for us.
A lean vision
Visions with catchy slogans and buzzwords are fine for marketing, but they serve little purpose in guiding the average employee in daily efforts. We were not suffering from a lack of vision; in fact, we had the opposite problem. The merger brought together myriad visions, values, and methods. Corporate had espoused the overall direction, but some organizations were struggling with translating it into actionable directives.
One struggle was language, particularly nouns. RMS employees often had four names for the same physical object. For example, an item as simple as the transparent film typically used with overhead projectors was referred to as a transparency, a slide, a flimsy, a view graph, and an overhead. Imagine the language challenge when there are multiple names for processes, parts, tools, and complex assemblies. Further transform those words into the jargon of acronyms and you can almost hear the problem yourself. Confusion reigned.
One solution was to find the verbs we agreed on. Verbs stay pretty consistent no matter the process name.
The core team decided to write a new and different kind of vision, one built with behavior descriptions. The focus of this different vision was on behavior and to a lesser degree, results, but not on status such as being the best in something The core team held a deep belief that if employees could understand what was expected of them, then they could translate that into supportive appropriate action. The core team thought if the focus was on verbs, behaviors, and actions, then a lean focus would be the best model to support change in the manufacturing environment. This is because lean is based in how work gets done as it enables the elimination of waste.
We wrote a 634-word vision statement that read as if we were standing in the future and we were merely reporting what we saw: it described what was happening in terms of action. Its existence challenged our norm of terse, cute, and innovative slogans. Our operations' leadership shared our long vision statement with other company leaders and received gentle teasing in return, such as "Those operations guys need a lot of instruction." Translation: "You can't do that, it's different!" Yet when that same vision was shared with middle management and lower-level operations employees, we could see the light of understanding come on in their faces. They got it; they understood what we were trying to accomplish.
A high-level roadmap
It is hard to eat an elephant in one bite, as the saying goes: likewise, it is hard to create a future reality in one giant step. Equipped with a vision of the future, the next challenge for the core team was to translate it into a roadmap tot actionable, meal-sized focus areas. The goal was to create a manufacturing excellence model to help focus attention, resources, and improvement efforts.
The core team's research of other successful methods was gathered and synthesized into 20 macro elements necessary for our manufacturing organization to he successful. The 20 elements are grouped under six focus areas as follows:
* Effective and productive culture: leadership and vision, learning culture, open communication. support integration, and product-focused organization. These five are supported by our operations management.
* Customer focused: customer requirements and customer satisfaction. The RMS customer-focused marketing initiative supports these two steps.
* Integrated planning and shaping: development integration, integrated enterprise planning, and risk management. These three are supported by our integrated product development system process and structure.
* Organized for lean, flawless execution: factory organization, workplace organization, parts presentation, pull systems, visual controls, and lean supply. Our Raytheon principles of manufacturing support these six steps.
* Perform on our commitments: supplier management, quality management, and cost and schedule performance. These steps are supported by business reviews.
* Drive continuous improvement: continuous improvement/Raytheon Six Sigma.
As illustrated in Figure I, these focus areas and elements integrate into our manufacturing excellence model (MEM). A metaphor for the model is a wheel on a car. The center is the axle and the drive for improvement. The inner circle is the wheel and is foundational as an operating infrastructure. And the outer circle is like the tire--where the rubber meets the road--representing the business process at the macro level. Repetition provides cycles of improvement and learning.
The MEM, in essence, became our defined operating model for lean implementation and improvements. Why was this important? There were many operating models in the organization, all competing with each other: One model needed to be defined and supported so that everyone could see and understand the goal.
MEM as maturity model
A lean operations vision and an overall roadmap for change were good enablers for improvement in our organization. Yet these two tools still represented too large a bite for each factory organization. It was still possible for the factory organizations to interpret and manifest things differently than what the team intended. A model of how well we were following the desired behaviors was needed--a maturity model. The core team's next goal was to subdivide MEM elements into bite-sized action able steps.
A capability maturity model index (CMMI) is a model for enterprise capabilities and development. We turned to it only to discover that it seemed to be missing manufacturing processes. Even though this was missing, the maturity concepts could be applied to the MEM it the levels were redefined for manufacturing concepts. We could create a tool to help us assess how well we use lean manufacturing methods. This could serve as a baseline as to how lean we were (or were not) and also provide a maturity ladder for each factory to climb, one step at a time, one bite at a time.
The core team tackled this problem by developing a diagram that illustrates the comparable level concepts of CMMI and MEM, moving from "Sloppy" to "Slick" (Figure 2).
Applicable snippets from the vision statement were used to describe Level 5--the best there is. Level 1 was easy to describe as not doing any of the desired behaviors. Then it was a matter of scaling the descriptions of desired behaviors in the remaining three levels. Level descriptors--behavior-based and worded to be observable and measurable--were designed to reduce arguments and eliminate partial level scoring.
Buy-in and participation
The core team had created a powerful tool to be used by committed employees to guide their improvement activities. This new tool and concept represented a common way to perform the business of manufacturing. However, most employees in operations were unaware of fine forthcoming changes. We now needed to create alignment and buy-in front the organization for this model and to change.
FEED