5 Steps to Manufacturing Excellence

1. 5 Steps to Manufacturing Excellence Manufacturing excellence, being the best of the best-the ability to provide high quality, competitively priced products and services in a global marketplace-is a major hurdle for most of the manufacturing organizations. The challenges they face are well known: QCDPMS i.e. Quality (Improve), Cost (Reduce), Delivery (on-time), Productivity, Morale & Safety improvement. But organizations are preoccupied with short-term target achievements like production per day, monthly revenue target and so on, while neglecting the long term investments & focus needed to compete in the international & competitive arena. So achieving manufacturing excellence will be the key to survive in such competitive market. But the question is how do you achieve manufacturing excellence? How to have aligned & disciplined culture? Many organizations launch such initiatives with great enthusiasm but over a period of time it becomes a flavor of the month program and is lost in the glut of competing initiatives. To answers such questions or to share the secret of long term sustainable manufacturing excellence Kaizen Institute, the global pioneer & leader of operational excellence is organizing a 2 days national convention on operational excellence. Kindly block your seats & be there to learn more about manufacturing/ operational excellence. This convention is designed specifically to overcome major pitfalls.

2. The journey to manufacturing excellence is not easy as it takes commitment to a vision of operational/ manufacturing excellence and a persistent effort over time by everyone, everyday and everywhere. And pulling in everybody is not an easy task. Its relatively easy task if the team has to move in the same direction - but it is altogether a different thing if the direction needs to be changed and manufacturing excellence needs to be embraced. Achieving manufacturing excellence includes following steps: Step one: Lead: Build belief To facilitate organizational leadership reach a shared understanding of Manufacturing Excellence (ME) for building competitiveness and to set direction for a future state vision. Step two: Assess – Design roadmap Evaluation of current processes & systems against contemporary practices reveals potential for improvement. Current state KPIs are measured and targets for intermediate future states are determined in order to arrive at a roadmap. Step three: Develop – Employee capability & culture In order to internalize the journey to OE, people capabilities are essential. Capabilities to lead OE transformation, to provide internal guidance for use of improvement & sustenance tools and to build OE behaviour at the workplace – all are supported. Step four: Improve – Processes & practices Implementation of the roadmap is facilitated through Gemba Kaizen Workshops – our unique delivery methodology. Step five: Sustain – Retain the gains Daily Work Management practices involving Gemba employees & leadership are used to institutionalize routines necessary for sustaining improvements & for ongoing improvement through people engagement. To conclude, manufacturing excellence is moving from Tools to Transformation which starts by building the belief of the management and seeking their commitment. Above 5 steps broadly sums up a tools to transformation attempt in any organization. One can follow all the five steps in sequence or even start with an intermediate step (depends on the current state of the Operational Excellence journey in the organization). In case you missed it, my last post was Developing a Lean Culture