Competitive Manufacturing Edge

Is your company firmly committed and involved with making Manufacturing Excellence an integral part of the management process? After serious consideration, candid answers to the following 10 questions will help you benchmark how your organization is progressing toward the goal of Manufacturing Excellence.

The scoring system is 10 points for yes and zero points for no answers. Nothing less than 100 points or 100% performance is really acceptable if Manufacturing Excellence is an integral part of your company's strategy for competitive advantage.

• Do we have a formal, top management driven Sales and Operations Planning process for determining the capacity requirements, financial resources, cycle times, etc. to support

anticipated customer demand?

• Does our organization thoroughly understand that excess inventory masks operational and quality problems, making it difficult to identify the specific cause for correction?

• Do we know the expected reduction in work-in-process and finished goods inventories from shorter cycle times?

• Has the entire organization developed the mindset to constantly identify problems and immediately resolve them?

• Are we working aggressively on the redesign of complicated products which are difficult to manufacture because they have been overdesigned?

• Does senior management thoroughly understand that they decide how important quality is and improvement begins from that point?

• Have we calculated the production capacity increase from a 75% or more reduction in current changeover times?

• Have we significantly reduced alternate sources of supply and made our primary vendors working partners?

• Do our performance measurements stimulate improvement in the right direction?

• Do we have a well-conceived, documented action plan that has the organization focused on and aggressively working on the right issues?