Customer Dynamics

Are you doing the right things? How well are you doing them? Are you on the right track to world class performance? An effective manager would not only constantly be asking these questions but would have reliable, up-to-date answers to them. These answers would indicate your current levels of performance and reveal the opportunities for improvement. The Oliver Wight ABCD Checklist for Operational Excellence provides an industry standard for benchmarking the five processes.

For any assessment to be useful, there are two prerequisites: first, the participants must be knowledgeable in terms of understanding principles and techniques for each process; and secondly, they must strive to be fair and reasonable in grading themselves,

avoiding seeing the world through rose colored glasses or being overly critical.

In assessing a company's current position, it's important to separate causes from symptoms. Frequently people blame the wrong things for their problems. Working on the right solutions can only occur if you have correctly identified the right causes. A useful approach is to breakdown problem areas into four categories:

• How well are people doing their jobs? Do they have the right skills? Are they motivated and measured fairly? Education and training are prerequisites for raising peoples' skills; enabling them to perform to their full potential.

• Are the right tools available? A convenient temptation is for people to blame their tools. For example, it's always possible to find flaws in computer generated information, be it timeli­ness, content, ease of maintenance, etc. Often these are minor flaws, deserving only sympathy; other times there are "show stoppers" that are vital to be corrected.

• Have they been given a fair opportunity to apply their skills and tools effectively? An overloaded master schedule, for example, would prevent material planners, shop supervisors and operators, buyers and schedulers from doing a good job no matter how hard they tried.

• Are the functions integrated? Within a company, some depart­ments operate extremely well but do not mesh smoothly with other areas. Instead, there is internal competition rather than good teamwork.

An objective assessment will reveal the pockets of excellence and the pockets of opportunities. The action plan must then prioritize the sequence for addressing the weak spots and reflect how to integrate them with the strong spots.

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