A Bolt statement: stable operations and always meeting the plan is possible
Gert Klein
Published at
Are you running an operation that is having difficulty to consistently meet the daily output plan? Here is some advice that may suit your need. First, stop just looking at your plan and start looking at your capability. In most cases, the capability of your plant is where you will find the answer to your problem. In our experience, many plant managers don’t have a clear picture of what this capability is. Nor does anyone else. And hence planners plan whatever they think your operation can produce or at best what it has ‘ever’ produced. No wonder you have difficulty meeting the daily plan.
Let me clarify this by making a link to Jamaican sprinter and nine-time Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt. When he is asked what time it will take him on the 100 meters he doesn’t have to guess like your planners do. He knows it by a tenth of a second. Why? Take a look at the figure below.
It shows Usain’s last 24 race times at the 100 meters sprint during international tournaments since 2013. The figure shows that his best time was slightly under 9,8 seconds and his worst close to 10,1 seconds. On the left you can read the probability of any other race time that he has run.
This learns us that Usain Bolt is not only a very fast sprinter, but also that his race times are very stable. This is why he can set a realistic target and benchmark himself. If a run took longer, it was either a poor start or the finish where he lost time. He will probably study video footage to understand the root cause before he settles for an answer. Only if he knows that cause he can focus his energy on what he needs to improve. Therefor the stability in performance not only makes him predictable, it also offers him a change to get even faster.
If we project this on your daily operations, you might ask yourself the following questions:
Do I look at our performance every day or at monthly averages?
Do my production departments have a realistic target and benchmark with it, every day?
Do they ask why whenever the target is missed and do they only settle for an answer whenever the root of the problem is known?
Do you then focus the energy in your organization on eliminating this problem to improve the performance?
If you can you say yes to all of these questions, you will run stable operations soon. But maybe the answer is (partly) no. From our expertise based on more than twenty years of stabilizing core production processes we know how to help. At R&G we know what behaviors need to be addressed, what KPI’s need to available, what competences need to be developed and what core beliefs might stand in the way. And furthermore, we know how to change them.
Gert Klein is Senior Business Process Consultant at R&G Global Consultants in The Netherlands. If you want to learn more about the topic of stable operations, please download our latest white paper ‘The distorted view of COOs’ on the reality of operations. If you want to know more about our methodology StableOps or any other services and products of R&G Global Consultants, please visit rnggc.com or contact Gert directly at gert.klein@rnggc.com.
