VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [120]
“B. Don was always intimidated by Viktor,” Sarah murmured.
“Ancient history,” said Amy. “The point that I think Murphy was trying to make is that we had a system that worked well – and it was a constrained system, not a balanced system. I’ve gone back and looked at the metrics and I know that it did work. Look, I will never know as much about manufacturing as you, Wayne, or Murphy. But everything I’ve learned says that a constrained system is faster and easier to establish, and yields better results. Therefore …”
“All right, I have to admit, maybe the balanced line has skunked us,” said Wayne. “But here’s my other problem: we went around last year telling everyone about Lean Six Sigma and takt time and why they were so important. What happens now? What happens, for instance, when we tell them takt time doesn’t matter?”
“What matters more to them? Takt time or a paycheck?” asked Amy.
“Excuse me once again,” said Murphy, “but I have to agree with Wayne on this one. Employees will generally do whatever you tell them to do for the sake of that paycheck. But if you want them to care about their work – and more than that, about the larger mission – then you have to have credibility. We need to be careful that people don’t get the idea we’re just feeding them a new flavor of the month.”
“You know, I personally dropped out of Lean Six Sigma for a number of reasons,” said Sarah. “But Lean especially was very popular with the employees at F&D – not so much the analysts, but the technical staff. If we abandon Lean and Six Sigma and introduce something else, they’re going believe it was all just a bunch of … you know …”
“Bull twinkle,” suggested Murphy.
“Well, wait a minute. Are we?” asked Amy. “Are we abandoning Lean and Six Sigma? Because I never said we were.”
“I hope not,” said Wayne. “My whole life has been transformed by Lean thinking. I can’t throw away everything I’ve learned.”
“Amy, as I told you before I went to Rockville,” said Murphy, “there is a lot of overlap between Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints. The question is in how they are applied.”
Amy sat back and thought silently for a moment.
“Here is what we are doing,” she said. “We are going to integrate Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints. And we will use the appropriate parts of all three to increase and sustain the velocity of the business.”
Amy looked from face to face around the table.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“In physics,” said Sarah, “velocity is speed with direction.”
“Isn’t that what we want?” asked Amy.
“Lean and Six Sigma,” said Wayne, “are both about speed – eliminating waste and reducing variation so the flow is faster and costs less.”
“And the Theory of Constraints shows where to focus the improvements so that they have a real impact,” said Amy.
“Sounds right on the money,” said Murphy.
The discussion that Saturday – and, indeed, the debate at times – was long and intense, though not without harmony. By the middle of the afternoon they had created a tree of arrow-tipped lines connecting a progression of sticky note “leaves” on the previously blank whiteboard. In general form, this tree resembled the tree of Undesirables on the neighboring board, but this new tree rose to a happy outcome, and showed every condition that would have to occur in order for that outcome to become real.
Each rectangular note on the tree stated – in present tense, typically, although the progression implied the passage of time – something that had to be in place before the next, higher event on the tree could occur. The tree was read from bottom to top, with a terse statement of the “current reality,” as they called it, written on a trio of pink-colored notes at the very base:
Hi-T’s performance is declining.
Corporate objectives are being missed.
Our management mission: a performance turnaround bringing operational stability & financial growth.
From this declaration of the issues were what Amy called “injections