Efficient Plant December 2017 - 8

column | implementations

Demonstrate
Best
Practices
Dr. Klaus M. Blache
Univ. of Tennessee Reliability
& Maintainability Center

Are you all talk, or do you actually
demonstrate your commitment to best
practices, including doing simple things
such as having a rotation to keep break
rooms clean?

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OU CAN'T GET there by
talking about it. Benchmark
and do a gap analysis, plan
thoroughly, engage the workforce,
demonstrate, and implement. By
"demonstrate," I mean you can't just
talk the talk. You need to be able to
walk the talk. Can you practice the
same rules that you expect plant-floor
personnel to follow? As Ralph Waldo
Emerson wrote, "What you do speaks
so loudly, I cannot hear what you say."
Do you expect your plant-floor
employees to not bring food to the production line, yet they see engineers eat at
their desks? Is everyone expected to participate in standardized work processes
and keep the team rooms in order? How
do you demonstrate that value? Does
your salaried team (including you) have
a rotation to clean your break room?
I've said many times that more
than 70% of lean manufacturing,
total-productive maintenance, large
technology changes, and reliability-centered maintenance efforts
fail, i.e., achieve less than half of
the expected benefits. Many companies align the desired practices
with their organizational structure
and work-management processes.
Where these companies often fall
short is implementing the underlying
continuous-improvement processes
and developing sufficient employee
engagement
This is the engine behind putting
needed daily practices into place. Even
more important, it's what personalizes
(grows ownership) and sustains new
standardized work practices.
This was true more than 25 years
ago and is still critical for success

today. The excerpt below is from F.
James McDonald (1922-2010), past
president of General Motors, who
wrote the preface in Success Factors
for Implementing Change: A Manufacturing Viewpoint (Klaus M. Blache,
editor, Society of Manufacturing
Engineers, 1988):
"There's a saying in the automobile business that the real test comes
'when the rubber meets the road.' In
manufacturing technology, the real
test comes when a new automation
tool hits the factory floor. Financialplanning spreadsheets may forecast its
success with respect to cost improvement. Computer screens may display
its potential for quality assurance.
But, will the new technology meet its
objectives in real-life plant operations?
Let me point out that technology, from
conception through to implementation, is an intensely human endeavor.
For the very reason that technologies
are created by and for human beings,
human consideration should drive
implementation decisions. Does it
satisfy human objectives as well as
bottom-line objectives? These are valid
questions for the most fundamental
of reasons; ultimately, everything
depends on human acceptance."
In a nutshell, humanize and
demonstrate your way to top quartile
performance/best practices. EP

Based in Knoxville, Klaus M. Blache
is director of the Reliability &
Maintainability Center at the Univ. of
Tennessee, and a research professor
in the College of Engineering. Contact
him at kblache@utk.edu.

DECEMBER 2017
http://www.EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM
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