Chris Crosby

Situation: 

About to lose significant market share due to lack of ability to complete new R & D projects.

Challenges:

Conflicts, goal confusion, silos between departments, lack of decision making clarity and a cumbersome toll gate process created analysis paralysis and unclear accountability.

Actions: 

Stakeholders took part in experiential based training to improve their conflict skills, including recognizing and raising core systemic issues (i.e. lack of clear goals, competing priorities, and unclear cross group decision making).

Additional actions included:

• Utilization of a two day interactive process at the onset of each project designed to:
• Foresee and clarify potential project issues and create effective solutions to resolve them.
• Create a project timeline by the people working on the project.
• Plan for how to overcome each critical decision point.
• Clarity of accountability to a single point for each task and decision point.
• Creation of follow-up structures to ensure effective monitoring and proactive resolution of emerging issues.

Results:

The company successfully implemented 6 R&D projects in one year, up from zero the previous year, resulting in increased market share and positive movement toward growth goals.

Situation:

A manufacturing plant with overall declining production numbers worked unsuccessfully for years to implement lean manufacturing, - resulting in lost business/shipments to international competitors.

Challenges:

Many strong willed, but un-aligned employees, under performing work groups and unclear initiatives created distractions and lack of direction.

Actions:

Delivered an interactive goal alignment process with the plant manager and his lead team and cascaded it to each work group in order to clarify the overall plant goals, each work group’s goals, and the work processes that must be improved in order to achieve those goals. Part of the process included the employees raising the issues that need to be solved in order to achieve the goals.

A critical mass of employees participated in an experiential based training to increase their EQ, interactive skills and conflict skills. The training including recognizing and raising core systemic issues (i.e. lack of clear goals, competing priorities, and unclear cross group decision making).

Additional actions:

• Leaders, with employee collaboration, reduced plant initiatives (including lean manufacturing) to only focus on those critical to achieving the plant goals, that could be implemented with quality based on their resource constraints.
• Initiation of a new third party managed conflict resolution policy.
• A plant manager instigated policy transitioning all new leaders through a facilitated work group session aimed at ensuring effective, accelerated working relations during leadership transitions.

Results:

In two years the plant achieved:

• Lost Work Day rate from 0.25  to  0.  
• Total Recordable Rate from 3.73 to 1.58.
• First pass scrap from 6.43 to 2.70.
• Output per employee from 2983 to 3559.
• Complaints from 3.2 to 1.2.
• Yearly claims in dollar amount from $4,000,000 to 79,000.

Situation:

After a mandated ERP implementation to all of its 20 business units (BU), the first wave led to overall unacceptable results with one BU missing 50% of promised ship dates.

Challenges:

Our BU had not implemented an ERP system in many years. No formal implementation structures were in place to manage a large scale implementation. The IT leaders at time of implementation believed that the end users needed to be “sold” and that the employees had to live with no changes whatsoever.

Actions:

The Business Unit President was coached to do two things. One, inform her leaders to the critical importance of the project. Two, ensure that the implementation team used effective project structures giving voice to the end users by capturing all their issues with the software and resolving them methodically. Beyond that, implementation structures were clarified in the layers between the end users and top leadership.

Some actions included:

• Implementation structures created in the form of a regional lead team, plant representatives, functional area representatives, and from 30-70% of end users depending on work function.
• Creation of an software issue resolution process to ensure ensured effective decision making was facilitated by the IT project leadership but made by business leaders.
• A typical IT project plan was used combined with a not so typical decision process as to whether the project could move from each stage (process playback, conference room pilot, user acceptance training, go-live). 
• The project leadership was coached to inform and educate rather than sell, ensuring leaders over the end users knew the specific time commitments of their people and were able to engage in creative ways to overcome the difficult time commitments related expected changes.

Results:

Over a 4 year span, BU went live in 29 locations spanning North America, Central America, and Europe - missing zero shipments. Years later the same process was successfully used to concurrently implement simultaneously and successfully in four Asian countries.

Situation:

A manufacturing plant was losing 7 million in sales of spare parts due to a 45% on time delivery rate.

Challenges:

With little input from the workforce, and no effort to address the root cause, the managers tried unsuccessfully to solve the problems. Due to an inability to reach the past success rates, leadership’s lack of confidence resulted in them setting a low goal of 70% on time delivery.

Actions:

Managers aligned to solve the problem by utilizing a joint manager and worker driven plan, giving voice to the workers to better connect the order takers, producers and shippers. The knowledge learned by the utilizing the workers included:

• The inside sales person identified had no one to determine status of orders and would often not be able to obtain answers to critical questions.
• The person creating the parts  had no access to putting parts in the computer and instead the parts were put on a shelf or in the system and not cataloged.

Armed with that knowledge, we developed and implemented a connected, clarified improvement process.

Results:

Once the real issues were clarified, employees developed simple solutions that included real time uploading, better warehouse locators, clear single points of accountability and service standards for inquiries. Within two months the plant increased their on-time delivery to 95% and within several months they had captured over 7 million dollars in sales.