Product A scheduled to be delivered yesterday (12/16/09) to the customer was not assembled and the product that was not supposed to be assembled was completed instead. The production plan indicated that product A was supposed to be delivered yesterday. The customer changed their material hadnling system and we have been having material shortage problems since then. Hence some times, assembly has to be stopped due to material shortage. But, all the material required for product A was present. There was no material shortage and no manpower shortage. But, the product did not get assembled and hence was not ready for shipping.
When asked why was the product no assembled ?
The following answer was received. The shop floor workers A,B,C,D,E gave the following answer. Worker A "thought" that worker B would do the assembly, worker B "thought " that worker C would do the assembly and so on. They also thought that the group leader would do the assembly or ask one of them to do it. But, since they had not received any orders from the group leader yet, all the workers including the group leader went home for the day. ( the assembly was suppose to take place after office hours- i.e during over time). Yesterday morning (12/16/09), when the sales in charge checked , if Product A was ready for shipment. He found that it was not ready.
The production manger did not know about this problem, as it is the group leaders responsibility to inform the production manager, in case there is a problem. if production is completed on time. No follow up information is given to the production manager. ONLY if there is a problem, then the production manager is involved.
I would like to request for comments on the above problem in terms of- what is the problem here? is it the group leaders lack of responsibility? is it the production managers lack if involvement with the shop floor to check if the delivery deadlines are met.
is it the lack of internal communication within the group ? or is it simply lack of follow up?
I felt that there was lack of responsibility and poor communication as one of the causes for this problem.In Japanese the following term - Horensou- hohoku, renreaku, soudan. Update, communication, seek advice, was not followed.
What are your thought?
What Jim Womack Kept Telling Us
15 hours ago
Hi Nazia,
ReplyDeleteAbout 4 months back, we had similair problems in our facility. We were at 75% delivery to our customer, but we produced 95 % to takt consistently. We were confused as to could be the problem. We found out that we were shipping some future orders early increasing our customer's inventory on the parts they don't need. There was no emphasis to THE DUE DATE on the floor. The reason they did this is to combine part numbers to reduce the number of setups, in order to be more productive. Our management emphasized that we would rather have the customer satisfied than be productive, if they had the option of choosing between the two. We increased the font size on the print for the work orders in SAP. And by this we communicated to the floor to run in the sequence of due date and held the. Leads accountable for the same.
1. Managers have to be in the loop. Always. If they don't even know what is going on, what exactly they are going to manage? In most companies I know, the managers are generally sent a daily/weekly reports. And there should have been a system to check/remind about impending deadlines to almost everyone involved, including the manager?
ReplyDelete2. More than communication, the problem was of clear assigning of responsibility. Because no matter how clueless one might be, no matter how non-motivated one is, everyone has at least one reliable motive - "save your ass".
The process should have been like this : Leader/Manager X is assigned to see that the delivery for xyz is done on time. After that it becomes X's job to make sure that leader Y is assigned to see that product is delivered on time.
It is production manager's job at the end of the day to confirm that all scheduled deliveries for the day were made. And he could have easily done this by assigning someone to send him a daily report showing the status for that date... at least half hour *BEFORE* everyone went home. It is not that much of an effort for the manager(say 5 minutes), to quickly check the report and make sure all schedules were being met. Of course, as a manager he can obviously again delegate even that responsibility to someone else, no matter how busy he was.
In any case, the fault seems to lie with the group leaders. What excuse did they give?
Hey Nazia... Firstly the allocation of work should become a visual system..conceivably there would be a visual board in each section with each operator's name in columns and sequence of work or something in the rows.. the group leader puts visual allocation of work on some tokens or something under eack operator's name in the sequence the work needs to be taken up.. so the operator keeps doing work one by one...I hope this is in line with the exact problem...
ReplyDeleteIt was a problem of missed communication, manpower shortage and lack of a support system. The group leader did not inform the manager, that he did not have enough manpower to complete the order. He had asked a team member to complete the order. But, before leaving for the day, he did not check with that team member, if the order was complete. The production manager did not check, if production was taking place on time. He did not do any follow up with the group leader either.
ReplyDeleteAs an immediate counter measure, the production manager is holding a morning meeting everyday, where he checks, if the daily production targets can be met and if there are any problems concerning production.