VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [51]
“Soon,” said Wayne. “We’re now at the point that we can start selecting our first projects.”
“Good. Because the clock is running, and we’ve been laying out quite an investment,” said Amy.
“I’m aware of that,” Wayne assured her. “And, believe me, it’ll be worth it.”
Despite Amy’s impatience, a lot had been accomplished in the four months since Wayne had come to Hi-T. Key performance indicators – called KPIs – had been established and a lot of measurements were being taken in accordance with those. Formal statements of policy relating to LSS had been written. There had been the gigantic value stream maps. And there had been a lot of activity – events and meetings, and people by the dozens flying off to exotic Long Island where Winner had its corporate training center to learn Lean and Six Sigma techniques. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars per trained employee by the time it was all done.
The bills for LSS were certainly piling up, but this was not what really concerned Amy. The funding, some of it from corporate, was more or less within budget. However, there had been some disturbing “extras” that had been missed when the numbers were calculated, such as overtime for the hourly plant workers who were participating in LSS. There was also the drain on general performance caused by the numbers of people out of town on training. What was most troubling for Amy were the snide little comments Nigel Furst was making in his emails and phone calls about Hi-T’s performance, which was still uninspiring and problematic.
Indeed, in late January, Amy had to go to what was informally – and only half-jokingly – referred to as the “Crystal Ball.” This was when all of Nigel’s presidents had to make detailed presentations, with assessments of past performance and forecasts for the year. The “crystal ball” reference was to Nigel’s insistence on accurate predictions for the coming four quarters, and he absolutely insisted upon thorough, fully analyzed scenarios detailing the gains in revenue and income that were to be achieved. Furthermore, it was public in the sense that all the presidents were together in one room, and every presentation was video-recorded so that Peter Winn himself could watch his presidents perform. But there was another purpose to the video recordings: miss your projections on the numbers, and Nigel was likely to play back the video of your last presentation as a means of ridiculing you. In any case, each president – there were four of them in Nigel’s group – had to endure Nigel’s incisive, often critical, sometimes harsh assessments, and from what Amy had heard, he could be rather nasty about it.
As this would be Amy’s first Crystal Ball, she felt she simply could not go before Nigel without being able to assert that the Lean Six Sigma “revolution” was well under way at Hi-T. Hence, the modest pressure she was putting on Wayne Reese to keep the LSS ball rolling.
• • •
So in the first weeks of January, here they were, seated at that table. There was Amy, of course, as well as Murphy Maguire, Jayro Pepps, and Kurt Konani representing Oakton. Sarah Schwick and several others involved in LSS at F&D who had come in from Rockville. But notably absent was F&D head Viktor Kyzanski, who was off on client business.
“Good morning and welcome to what I like to call the LSS Action Presentation,” said Wayne Reese. “This is where we present our selections for the Lean Six Sigma projects that we feel will eliminate the most waste and explain what we want to accomplish, and then, of course, we ask for cooperation, and support, and permission to proceed. I know that all of us are anxious to get going.”
“You bet,” said Amy, seated in the semidarkness at the long table in the headquarters’ main conference room.
“All right, well, here we go,” said Wayne.
He pressed the button; the first graphic of the presentation appeared on the screen on the wall above the long table.
“What you see here,” said Wayne, “is what we call a ‘pick chart,’ and it’s simply a matrix divided into four quadrants.