In
my experience one of the problems of modern business is that while the ERP
system takes care of the nuts and bolts on the shop floor, there’s nothing to
take care of the management side. Most companies have very tight restrictions
on hiring indirect labour, so the small group of senior managers are ever
squeezed to take on additional responsibilities as businesses get more complex
and standards get higher.
In
a standards-driven organisation managers are under great pressure to act in
conformance with a multitude of policies, procedures and work instructions.
Most of the time they have to remember to do the right thing, and then they
have to decide to do it, since unlike the shop floor there’s no formal system
to guide them. The risk of deviation from standard is a constant problem as
individual managers struggle to get parts out on time. You may get over the
finish-line in the end, but the price is poor process control and higher costs
than necessary. That leads to variable quality, accidents, high energy costs,
lack of security and all kinds of waste.
In
business nothing continues unchanged for very long. Whether it’s a customer return, a process
change due to problems with material or tooling, a breakdown, scheduled
maintenance, contractors on site, near-miss or accident, training a new hire,
new product introduction or whatever, the managers responsible go off and do
stuff, on a best effort basis. They approve changes and do whatever it takes
but frequently the system doesn’t catch up and soon you’ve got more deviations
and the process is a little more out of control.
The
way it’s set up, Execution Dynamics has the potential to plug that gap because
you can teach it your standards. It’s quick and easy to reconfigure things and
because it’s intelligent it will error trap and be your safety net. It can
guide the manager to make the ad hoc change while tracking the implications,
risk assessing and making sure that everybody is in the loop. Actions later
either get reversed or universally adopted so that the process integrity is
maintained, and the manager doesn’t have to carry it all because he or she has
the support of the system.
Meanwhile
the boss has exception reports that could indicate trends before they become a
problem and also has the reassurance that a maverick can’t break something
important because the system will defend itself.
So
hang in there, help is at hand!
James
O’Sullivan
