Operational Systems

I was on the floor when an operator ran by me with a bucket. I followed him to the lithographic printing press where I watched him dump the bucket of chemicals into a chiller by hand. I asked why. He said he was having trouble setting his color. This was how they dealt with it. The top downtime in the factory was color setting time, the top quality defect was color variation, and the top waste was color setting waste. We had the Pareto charts. Everyone in ops knows the 80/20

Your organization has a structural problem that's destroying productivity. It looks like this: train the workforce, then hold supervisors accountable for adherence. It sounds reasonable. It fails reliably. Training doesn't transfer the way we assume it does. You can almost pick your study, they all say the same thing: the average transfer rate of training is between 10-15%. And what little does transfer, doesn't stay: Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped this in the 1880s with his for

It was already July and we were set to miss our quality target for the year. The quality manager asked if I had any ideas. In truth, I didn't. But I love a challenge. I'd just read The Power of Habit and I was enamored with the idea of using habits to improve process. So I set about building a method, and it came out pretty simple. I proposed that people break rules for 2 primary reasons: They don't know the standard or they don't think the standard is important. I proposed

My best operators had the worst OEE. Not because they were bad, but because they were the only ones who could run the hard jobs. OEE was the metric. On paper, my strongest people looked like my weakest. They knew it, I knew it and it made performance discussions impossible. We had over 200 dies in that department. Every SKU had its own die, some were easy to run and some were not. And more than that, OEE didn't tell me what to do. It was a number that described a problem wit

I was new to the factory. The day I showed up I found out the plant was in danger of being closed. Division published a plan for "plant consolidation"... and we were the bottom performer. They didn't mention that in the interview. My department had four maintenance techs. One on each shift. 24/7 coverage. And they were good. They knew their trades. We always had someone there for emergencies, but we never had enough people there to compete with emergencies. Every schedul

A core function approach to eliminating maintenance reactivity. Walk into almost any industrial facility and ask the maintenance manager how things are going. You will hear some version of the same answer: "We're getting killed and everyone is mad at us.”
 It's typically not a laziness or staffing problem. It's usually an organizational issue and sometimes a matter of technical knowledge. But it's fixable.
 Running maintenance is like driving through a forest. It's easier

Hiring a maintenance planner can set a maintenance shop back. I see it too often. As soon as a planner is hired, techs stop making parts lists. Because that's planning, and they want support. Techs are overworked. They want a planner so they can stop doing paperwork and get back to the floor. That's how it should be... right? Nope. If you're doing it that way, you're better off without the planner. Making parts lists... that's not a planner. That's a very expensive assista

Most manufacturers implement Lean too early. And it costs them. If you need to improve now, do not implement Lean. When a plant is under pressure to improve, the instinct is to reach for Lean. Kaizen events. Value stream mapping. 5S blitzes. It looks like action. It feels like progress. But plants that are under pressure to improve have something in common: they always have known problems they aren't solving. And if you have problems you aren't successfully solving, the pro

Most leaders think about errors one at a time. One mistake → one fix. Done. But that's not how it works on the plant floor or anywhere else people execute complex work under pressure. Every error you DON'T prevent creates the conditions for many more. Here's how: A team member skips a verification step. The product gets made wrong. Now you have rework. Rework eats time, disrupts the schedule, and puts people in a state of rushing. Maybe not just your facility, maybe materials

When I took over maintenance at a struggling facility some years ago, I found a machine rated at 14,000 units per hour running at 10,000. I did the math. At $0.60 spread per unit, that gap was worth $2,400 per hour in recoverable value (throughput accounting). I made promises. I found the money. I fixed the machine. The next week, it ran at 10,000 units per hour. No improvement. The operators told me the machine just couldn't go faster. The material wouldn't allow it. That's

Your inbox isn't just a mess, it's an indictment for how broken your processes are. I talk to leaders routinely who get 150-200 emails a day. If your process software owns routing, approvals, assignments, status, and escalations... what are you doing? It's like taking the parts you need to assemble something useful and mixing them in a big bowl with large quantities of similar looking useless junk. And then obligating yourself to look at everything in the bowl while you try

I recently received a DM asking what 180 OPEX actually does. We fix process compliance problems. So what's a process compliance problem? That's when habits, convenience, distraction or disinterest at any level derail success because your team isn't in full alignment with your process. Now, there are really 3 ways to be out of alignment with the process: 1) Complacency - We don't follow the process because we don't think it's important (or it's inconvenient and nobody cares

Lean is irrelevant to your operation right now. Not because it doesn't work. But because if you keep having the same problems, which is where most of industry lives, you have a control problem. And Lean doesn't fix control problems. It hides them. Here's what a control problem looks like: An operator puts the wrong date/label/product/lid/quantity on the wrong box/pallet/product, and now you're scrapping, reworking, or apologizing your way out of another disaster. This happe

You're Just Not Running It Right. Games aren't fun because they're games. That sounds backward, so let me say it plainly: there is nothing inherently enjoyable about jumping on a mushroom or chasing an oblong leather ball. What makes games fun is that they simulate things we're already driven to experience: status, mastery, belonging, discovery, completion. Yu-kai Chou spent years mapping this out in a framework called Octalysis, which identifies eight core human motivation

Everyone in industry knows Deming's line: "A bad system beats a good person every time." It's true. Systems make success. But systems require a foundation. Without it, they don't work. We can prove this experimentally. Lean is one of the greatest system-building tools ever conceived. And it fails the vast majority of the time. The statistics are clear and supported by thousands of iterations. Why does it fail? Ask the Lean practitioners and they'll tell you: leadership. But i

And why the difference between the two always compounds Every plant manager has watched it happen. A changeover gets rushed at the start of second shift. The operator swaps the change parts but doesn't verify something critical. Maybe it's a standard that's been written down, maybe it's not. The line runs for forty minutes before someone notices there's something wrong (bottles dented, labels crooked, wrong materials, wrong print, etc). Now there's a quality hold, a financial

Every plant issue you're battling traces back to the same root cause. Process inadherence. That is to say, your people aren't following your processes. I know that sounds reductive. Stay with me. This is a good argument. I promise. Every problem you have is either a deviation from a process or a defect in a process. That's it. Full stop. But that's 2 causes, right? No, not really. Here's the uncomfortable truth most plant leaders already know but won't say out loud: Leadershi

There are Three Systems Every Plant Needs and They Have to be Implemented in Order There are three core systems in every manufacturing operation. Most plants only build one of them and it's the wrong one to start with. Your first system is Accountability. It's the system that gets people to follow a process. Your second system is Continuous Improvement (CI). It's the system that makes the process your people are following better as you learn things. Your third system is Daily

Most organizations don't have a training system or an accountability system. They have training events and they have punishment events. And, statistically speaking, neither training nor punishment events are very effective. Here's how punishment events work in practice: Wait for disaster. Trace it back to where a standard wasn't followed. Punish to deter recurrence. Nobody was checking that standard before the disaster which is why it happened in the first place. The system o

Hand a team a mission with no planning and everything except the desired end-state becomes an unknown. Under those conditions, Hofstadter’s Law rules: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” Every unclear step, hidden risk, surprise need, and mismatched expectation lands squarely in the gap you left, which causes performance to suffer. Leaders who issue jobs like this live in perpetual disappointment because every single job