VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [94]
Then there was Wayne Reese. She was going to have to speak with him as well. She squeezed her eyelids shut, and she pinched the bridge of her nose at the prospect. He, too, would try to put his own spin on the situation. Wayne, she expected, would be more forthright and more outwardly concerned than Viktor. But Wayne was so optimistic about his Lean Six Sigma methods – his belief so total – that he would also try to convince her to stay the course. Inertia, though he would never call it that, was what was best. In the end, it would all just work out. The savings from waste elimination would trickle to the bottom line, and all would be well.
When Amy finally opened her eyes, she saw that outside her windows the winter’s evening sky was now dark.
“Before we get started on the details, let me just say that I do think we’re holding our own.”
Those were the first words from Wayne Reese after he sat down to meet with Amy Cieolara. This was three days after Amy had read the fourth quarter report. The following morning she had signed off and authorized Elaine to send the report on to New York in order to meet the Winner corporate deadline. She had shortly afterward sent a copy to Wayne and given him time to review it. Now, they were seated across from each other at the table in Amy’s office. Wayne was fidgety, perhaps sensing what might be coming, but making every effort to project confidence. Amy’s face was dour.
“I mean, seriously, we’re headed in some good directions,” he continued. “Last week I was talking to Kurt out at the plant and according to his projections we ought to have the perfect black-belt to green-belt ratio sometime within the coming year. That’s just one more indication of the momentum we’re building, and as that momentum continues, we’re really going to see some great things happen in the years and even decades to come.”
“Decades,” Amy repeated.
“Sure. Absolutely. Once the culture is in place, the improvements will just keep going and going.”
“Great. When do the improvements start?”
“When do they start? The improvements have already started! Amy, look at what we’ve been able to achieve so far: we almost have a perfectly balanced line! Employee utilization is just about as high as we can hope for! In one year we have saved one-point-two million dollars’ worth of wasted resources!”
“Then where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“The one-point-two million in savings,” said Amy. She lifted her printout of the financial report she had sent to corporate, and shook it so the pages riffled, as if dollar bills might fall out, all the while asking, “Is it in here? Because if it is, I don’t see it.”
Wayne frowned, then attempted to mount a defense.
“Amy, as I said at the very beginning when I first came here, Lean Six Sigma is a long-term proposition.”
“Yes, but we started down this road over a year ago. I really thought that by now we would be seeing some kind of real improvement –”
“But we are!”
“No, Wayne, I am not talking about the black-belt to green-belt ratios. I am not talking about employee utilization. And I am not talking about a balanced line; I am talking about the bottom line.”
He stared back at her with a rather hurt, glum expression on his face.
“Look. Hi-T is basically not making any more money now than we were a year ago,” said Amy. “That much is terribly clear from the financial report I just turned in. And despite a good economy, we made slightly less than we did before we started LSS – and far less than we did during that one year when Randal was president. Furthermore, we are also actually earning less now than we were before Winner acquired us. So we have not been able to beat any of the numbers going back four or five years. My question is why?”
Wayne cleared his throat, but then sat there in silence for a few seconds, and finally blurted out, “I – I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer for you. After all the progress we’ve made, you would think that the financial performance would show it – that