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BEING lean is still the current craze in management. Walk into a
factory. Go to a bulletin board where managers are showing off their
achievements with quality circles, suggestion schemes and production
records beating last month’s ultimate facts and figures by a mile.
Then you’ll wonder how they could do all
these.
The message of these programs is that “doing
more with less” is no longer enough. In today’s
highly-competitive, dog-eat-dog environment and back-stabbing
workplace, when we hear one manager talking about how he was able to
do more with “less resource,” chances are, he is about to be
transferred to the company’s urinal-storage facility in Camote
Island.
Forget about your service awards. And even your
above-average performance if it’s not tested in a Balanced
Scorecard setting made perfect by 360 Degree Feedback.
“Doing more with less” is not enough.
You’ll have to do it continuously with less and less resources
(capital, manpower, equipment, etc). These days, organizations want
their managers who are never satisfied with their accomplishment.
They want people who either make or demand the best in everything,
someone who, if he had been in-charge of building Egypt’s pyramid
would have said to his army of slaves:
“That’s an excellent pyramid but I’m not
satisfied. I want you to build a much better pyramid and I want it
by tomorrow morning!”
This is the kind of thinking that our dynamic
managers are doing to continuously propel their respective
corporations. Take the folks at Toyota Motor. For five decades since
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic bombed, the people at Toyota were
not content in simply improving the design, make and performance of
their cars and trucks.
That’s why most of the time, they talk of
Kaizen (everything that works is obsolete) and JIT (just-in-time)
production system and everything in-between. Toyota continues to
build better motor vehicles and in greater numbers than General
Motors and Ford, which continued to rely much on lean principles to
close their plants.
But then came along Factory Physics by Wallace
Hopp and Mark Spearman (3rd Edition, McGraw-Hill 2008) with the bold
concept that pushes managers to internalize “the underlying
behavior of manufacturing systems to identify opportunities for
continuous improvement, design effective new systems, and make the
trade-offs needed to coordinate policies from disparate areas.”
That’s the “short answer” for the purpose
of this article. The “long answer” is found by buying the book,
reading it from cover to cover, putting it in the proper context,
focusing on operations management and manufacturing to bring about
excellence in “manufacturing operations.”
The point is that finding excellence, or to be
more accurate, “striving for excellence,” extends into the
workers’ and managers’ personal lives as well. When they buy
something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price (2)
function and (3) lack of choice.
Filipinos buy imported rice. Or to be more
precise about it, we buy smuggled rice. Not because we can afford
it, but simply because there’s no choice as we’re stuck with a
crisis-reactive government.
The same thing is true with Meralco and GSIS.
We’re stuck with an enormous amount of incompetent officials
fighting, simply because we have no choice because they are in
power, literally and figuratively.
But going back to the matter at hand—factory
physics—I should say that even the service industry like Meralco
and GSIS should take it to heart that they, too, can lower the price
of electricity with less and less resources.
Nobody is excused from the lean trend, much more
with factory physics because you can use the same principle to
convert it to office physics.
Mark my word. As long as you have the common
sense to improve on things, then you’re not excused. I’m sure of
that. So anyway, as I said, this got me to thinking about technology
and buzzword, once again.
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Rey Elbo is a business consultant
specializing in human resources and total quality management as a
fused specialty. Readers’ feedback may be sent to kairoshq@info.com.ph.
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