It's in the bag

Three weeks ago, I talked about two local community projects. Both were well-planned, well-funded and had a team of very smart people backing them. Two weeks ago, we dissected the one that didn’t work. Let’s talk a little about the one that did. The project team recognized that too many children in our local school districts go hungry. Schools in these communities feed breakfast and lunch to kids, and on school days, the kids expect that they will have food there. A bigger issue exists in the time between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

A group of engineers got together and identified the ideal size and weight of a brown paper lunch bag that would easily fit in a child’s backpack, one that looks just like a lunch bag they might have carried to school themselves. Those engineers then architected a set of non-perishable food items that they put in each bag that would feed the kids for the weekend, including more than a dozen items like soup, macaroni, fruit bars, applesauce and other nutritious items. The items were carefully stacked to maximize the number of items they could give. Bags were distributed to individual teachers who had a desk drawer where they kept them. Each Friday, students could grab a Power Pack for the weekend.

So where’s the lesson in this one? They listened and met the need, right?

Not exactly. Ask a kid to name 5 non-perishable foods they’d want to take home for the weekend. How many would say a can of soup or pack of rice? While the candy and snacks that are high on their list are delicious and packed with the calories they need, they don’t meet their nutritional needs.

Production Operations

Your team will have ideas of what they want or need. These can be very personal and may be based on actual experiences, both at your business and prior ones. They may be a little selfish for what they ask. You did ask and you need to be prepared for this. But they may also not be aligned with what would help them. Let me give you an example.

We worked with a team that had a production schedule (Excel) and regular team meetings (they worked in groups of 8 – 10). They relied on their team lead for everything. The lead was responsible for assigning and managing work, solving issues and getting materials for the team as needed. The team was embedded in a system that relied on that team lead to do work.

The team determined that they needed a tool to color-code their work. They were not focused on quality (they didn’t see the problem) and didn’t consider what was going on in other teams. The shop floor team was so segmented, they could not properly answer questions around what they needed. Their production operations were based on siloed groups. Ineffective. Broken.

Paperless Operations

For that particular team, we needed to look beyond (above) the group dynamic. We took the conversation up a level to the plant management to understand problems that were going on. While team leads knew what was going on with their particular group, management had no visibility into production operations as a whole. The shop floor was a “black hole.” We hear this particular phrase all the time; it’s used to describe what’s happening when you send a job / order to the shop and then you lose track of where it is. We needed to help the team leads understand the bigger picture and get their buy-in to a digital system – Paperless Manufacturing for their shop involved more collaboration than assignment. We’ve made it a habit to work closely with our customer teams to understand these dynamics and help you navigate the conversation. If you don’t know where to start, just ask. We’ve got it “in the bag.”