Sep 17 2012
Deming’s Point 4 of 14 – End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag…
(Picture from TYWKIWDBI)
The complete wording of Deming’s Point 4 is as follows:
“End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.”
Today, you will encounter no one involved with supply chain management who would argue against the idea of basing purchasing decisions on the total cost of having the item on hand when needed for production and developing collaborative relationships with suppliers. The idea of single-sourcing every item, on the other hand, makes many managers nervous, but, without such a committed relationship, you cannot have information exchange at the depth required for collaboration to pay off.
As of 2012, however, very few companies have followed through on this recommendation. What we have seen instead in the past 20 years instead is “We’ll skip Lean and go straight to China,” based exclusively on temporarily cheap labor, without due consideration to local infrastructure, quality and productivity issues, and logistics. Companies that are “reshoring” after being burned at this now have an opportunity to implement this most specific and least controversial of Deming’s 14 points.
It breaks down into the following specific recommendations on what is now called supply chain management:
- End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag.
- Minimize total cost.
- Move toward a single supplier for any one item.
- Develop long-term relationships of loyalty and trust with suppliers.
Stop awarding business on the basis of a price tag
In this area, companies don’t behave like individuals. Whether you buy food, clothing, household appliances, or the services of a plumber, you don’t systematically choose the lowest price. Like the astronaut on the launch pad, you do not want every part in the rocket to have been made by the lowest bidder. Even if you are hunting for bargains, you also consider quality, delivery, and the availability of support. You willingly pay more for appliances that are reputed for working well, lasting long, operating quietly, match the design of your house, and have spare parts and service readily available.
In principle, a company’s purchasing agents should think the same way. When they don’t, it is because they are evaluated on the prices they are able to negotiate and because they are not familiar with the actual use of the materials or equipment they buy. If you hired a third party to do your shopping, with instructions to find the lowest prices, you are unlikely to be happy with the results or even to same money over time.
Because they don’t use what they buy, purchasers rely on specs to decide whether a supplier’s product meets the company’s needs. As Deming points out, however, conformance to specs is never synonymous with fitness for use, no matter how carefully the specs are written. Specs only work as a one-way filter; if a product is out of spec, you know you can’t use it, but, if it is within specs, it does not guarantee that you can. Juran distinguished between true and substitute characteristics. The true characteristics are what you are really after, like the taste of a cake. Unfortunately, you cannot verify it without eating the cake, so you use substitute characteristics that you can measure, like the cake’s diameter or the sugar content of the ingredients. If they are out of specs, you know there is something wrong with the cake, but they can all be within spec and the cake still taste awful.
Relying on specs in purchasing is therefore taking necessary conditions and treating them as sufficient. But how do you avoid doing this? Deming does not say. I recommend the following:
- Avoid perverse incentives. Use metrics for purchasing that do not overemphasize the price.
- Implement Lean supply chain management. It is a broader subject than just buying based on price, but it provides a context for a more balanced approach to evaluating suppliers.
- Rotate professionals in and out of Purchasing. This means treating purchasing as a skill employees should have rather than a career. If you have people in Purchasing who have previously worked in Production or Engineering, they will have a better understanding of the issues.
- Give end users a voice in Purchasing. Purchasing should not have the authority to switch suppliers without the approval of those who consume the materials or use the equipment.
Minimize total cost
For manufacturing, it means considering everything it takes to have good materials within arm’s reach of the production operator for as long as the line is running on this product, as opposed to the price on a purchase order. For equipment, it means looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO), also a term that was introduced after Out of the Crisis came out.
The only issue Deming raises is that of quality, but it is not the only one, particularly when you consider switching from a supplier located 10 miles from your plant to one that is 6,000 miles and 10 time zones away in an unfamiliar country. You have to consider transportation, longer lead times, communications and travel.
Furthermore, discussing cost and quality in the same breath leads naturally to thinking about what the literature calls “cost of quality.” The literature on quality defines this cost as the sum of the direct costs of failure, appraisal and repair, and omits the impact of quality on sales, as being too “controversial” and difficult to measure. This “cost of quality,” however, is the tip of the iceberg; it grossly underestimates the business consequences of quality problems, as shown, for example by the Firestone tread separation issue in 2000 or Toyota sticky accelerator pedals in 2010. A car maker’s reputation for quality is its crown jewels, and the answer on how much effort it should put into nurturing is is whatever it takes.
While transportation costs are relatively easy to calculate, the cost of expanding lead times from days to weeks or months is, in some cases, much larger than the cost of having inventory in transit. For example, toys sold in the US during each Christmas season are made in China the previous summer, but you cannot tell bestsellers from duds until late in the fall, by which time there is nothing you can do to adjust the supply.
To follow Deming’s recommendation here, you consider not the unit price of the item but all the outflows of funds generated by the decision to buy it for a given supplier for as long as you intend to do it, knowing that this may vary from a few months for fashion-related items to several decades for airplane parts. The question is not the price of one unit but, for example, what it takes to make, say, 1,000 usable units available on your production line every day for the next four years. And you have to write at least a best-case, worst-case, and most likely scenarios of how it may unfold in terms of volumes, quality and delivery performance, and technical support of the supplier. Each scenario results in cash flow schedules that can be compared.
Such an analysis cannot be done without making assumptions about product life, demand, and supplier capabilities. It is more complex than picking the lowest bidder, but the stakes are high.
Move toward a single supplier for any one item
What happens when your single supplier fails? It happened to Toyota with the Aishin Seiki fire of February, 1997. The plant was Toyota’s single source of proportioning valves for Toyota in Japan. Toyota’s factories shut down within four hours of the fire, the supplier network was mobilized, production was restarted within a week, and was back to full volume in 6 weeks. In the Japanese press, the fire was initially viewed as a failure of Toyota’s system; by the time it ended, it was a vindication of it.
If you buy thousands of items, even with a single source for each, you will have hundreds of suppliers. If you have a policy of having at least two sources for each item, you will have even more suppliers and more complicated relationships to manage. Deming emphasizes the impact on quality, but it touches in fact every aspect of supplier relations. Juggling multiple suppliers for each item is playing the field; having a single source, a monogamous relationship.
If, for each item, you have a single source for whom you are a major customer, your plan for dealing with emergencies like the Aisin Seiki fire is to rely of the strength of your supplier network to come up with an appropriate response. The Wall Street Journal article about the Aisin Seiki fire in May, 1997 described the response of Toyota suppliers as the manufacturing equivalent of an Amish barn raising.
Sudden surges in demand are not an issue in car manufacturing, but they are in other industries, like semiconductor production equipment. If you are a machine shop making components for this industry, you may see demand doubling overnight simply because one semiconductor company placed a big order for machines in a new wafer fab. You know that sudden changes in the economy may cause this order to be cancelled, and you cannot count of other orders filling up you slack capacity once this order is filled. In this case, rather than investing in additional equipment that is unlikely to be permanently needed, suppliers have been known to make second-sourcing agreements with competitors to provide surge capacity. One consequence of such arrangements is that the parts arriving at the customer plant may come from different suppliers. From the customer’s perspective, however, it is still a single-sourcing arrangement, because the primary supplier remains responsible for quality and delivery.
Develop long-term relationships with suppliers
A six-year contract representing 30% of your sales to be a customer’s sole supplier of a component sets the stage for a different working relationship than a one-year contract representing 10% of your sales, in which you are one of a stable of suppliers among which the customer splits the demand. Exclusive, long-term relationships are clearly a required foundation for the collaboration that the entire literature on supply chain management agrees should take place between suppliers and customers, but generally doesn’t.
“Arms around” is better for both sides than “arm’s length” and adversarial. So why is it so rare, and what can we do to make it more common? The abundant literature on supply chain management fails to see what I think is the elephant in the room: unlike a plant, a supply chain is ruled by the interaction of multiple, independent economic agents. This is discussed in Chapter 19 of Lean Logistics (pp. 341-352). The summary is as follows:
In the lean supply chain, the traditionally adversarial, arm’s length relationship between supplier and customer makes way for a collaborative approach, centered on long-term single-sourcing agreements, and extensive exchanges of business information and technical know-how. This approach increases the total payoff of the relationship, but transitioning to it is difficult because it requires behavior changes on both sides.
Sustaining it over time also requires management to consistently forgo the short-term windfalls that can be reaped through a unilateral return to the adversarial approach. That supplier and customer should collaborate to increase the total payoff does not prevent each one from negotiating aggressively with the other on sharing this payoff.
Once you acknowledge that a collaborative relationship takes a long time to build and are easily destroyed by either side, you can manage it accordingly and give it the attention it requires.
Nov 28 2012
Deming’s Point 9 of 14 – Break down barriers between departments
(Featured image from the Bureaucracy game, by Douglas Adams)
Deming’s complete statement of Point 9 is as follows:
Within a large organization, it is common for departments to work at cross purposes. Each department is a functional silo, working towards goals that may be inconsistent with the interests of the whole. Deming gives many examples of disasters that occur as a consequence, and exhorts his readers to break down the barriers to keep them from happening. As with his other points, he makes no recommendation on how to accomplish this.
Let us examine several approaches that have been tried, and the issues that organizations encountered when they did:
Eliminating silos in the organization
This is not a problem for small companies. As long as the entire management team fits within a small conference room, there are few opportunities to erect barriers. In a large company where it is a problem, the most obvious solution is to organize by what is variously called business teams, business processes, value streams, or focused factories.
You dissolve the functional departments and organize multifunction teams that bring all the required talent to bear on the core activities. In a manufacturing company, for example, all the resources needed to make a family of products from start to finish — including engineers, maintenance and quality technicians, schedulers, etc. — report to one “value stream manager,” and there cannot be barriers between silos because there are no silos.
It’s like the Mission Impossible TV series, with the disguise specialist and the explosives expert working together towards a common goal, as opposed to being in separate facilities and exchanging service requests in triplicate. This is a popular picture in the US and the approach is often used in a variety of contexts, such as emergency response, as in Apollo 13, or product development, for Data General’s MV-8000 computer in 1980 in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, or the 1996 Taurus at Ford in Mary Walton’s Car.
The movie Apollo 13 shows a seemingly too-good-to-be-true team that is thrown together to find a way to fit the square connector of the command module air scrubber to the round hole used on the lunar module, using nothing but the odds and ends available to the astronauts on the crippled spacecraft. But the story is true, and we have a picture of the actual device the astronauts built.
Making functional departments work
But it is not a panacea. The development of the 1996 Taurus took 30 months, and it was a major improvement over previous products at Ford, but still not down to the 24 months used at Toyota for the Rav4, and Toyota uses a traditional structure with functional departments communicating through memos.
The reality is that organization structure does not determine outcomes. The caliber of the individuals, their motivations for the roles they are playing, and their interaction protocols are at least as important. In their July, 1998 Harvard Business Review article , D.K.Sobek, J. Liker, and A.C. Ward listed the following practices as key to Toyota’s performance in product development:
Obstacles to organization by process or value stream
The Toyota example is about product development. But what about other activities like operations? When you attempt to organize everything by business process, or by value stream, in most cases you encounter some functional departments that you technically cannot or should not break up.
Most machine shops have a central heat treatment facility. Induction hardening can, for some work, distribute heat treatment among different production lines and break down the “heat treat silo,” but a given shop may make products to which it is not applicable, its customers may not approve the process, or it may not have the skills or resources to implement it. Electroplating and painting commonly are similar challenges. As a result, the plant ends up with a few common services organized as functional departments along with lines that take a family of products through a sequence of operations.
Among support functions, the picture is also mixed. Production scheduling at the detailed level, for example, works better when the schedulers work directly for the manager of a production line than in a central department, because local scheduling is a simpler problem and the relevant specifics of machine behaviors are more accessible. On the other hand, breaking down a maintenance department and making the technicians report to production managers may not enhance their responsiveness when, for example, the group assigned to a line is short of the critical mass needed to have at least one technician standing by for the next emergency.
Other departments remain organized centrally because of the information they have access to, like Human Resources, Accounting, or Technical Data Management; others, because of external entities they deal with, like Shipping and Receiving.
Skills maintenance, continuing education and career planning
When breaking down a functional department and reassigning its members to teams organized around processes, we also need to consider how it affects the people to whom we do it. Professionals like medical doctors or lawyers work for clients who have little or no knowledge of their specialties, but it is then up to them to decide how much of their revenue to spend or maintaining their skills. They choose which magazines tp subscribe to and which conferences to attend, without asking anybody’s permission.
An engineer reporting to a production manager also works for one “client” who does not have the same expertise, but as an employee. If this engineer wants to attend a conference, the first step is to get approval for the time and money it will consume, from a manager with no knowledge of whether it is a good idea.
In the long term, what career does this engineer have to look forward to? The manager needs the engineer’s skills here and now but is ill equipped to provide guidance, compared to an engineering manager whose background and experience are in the same field.
For this reason, some companies have adopted matrix organizations, in which specialists report “solid-line” to a process owner who needs their skills in operations or on projects, and “dotted-line” to a functional manager for skills maintenance and career development. In a diagram, as follows, this structure looks simple and attractive:
In reality, of course, it is a more complex form of organization than a simple hierarchy, and conducive to all sorts of tensions regarding authority and responsibility.
Project transitions
Project work — like product development, new product introduction, or new plant setup — differs from operations in that it ends when a goal is reached, which may be a working prototype, a target takt time in production for the new product, or for the new plant. At that point, the teams are disbanded and their members move on.
This is a particularly sensitive transition to manage when you collocate a multifunction project team in one big room, because its members bond both with the project and with each other, and receive the ending like a psychological blow on the scale of the loss of a family member. This is another reason why they need to retain a connection with their functional peers.
Conclusions
Breaking down barriers between departments for the greater good of the organization as a whole is a worthy goal, that high-level managers have been pursuing since, at least, the Roman empire. There is no simple recipe. The approaches followed by successful organizations have been subtle, nuanced, and fitted to their purposes.
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By Michel Baudin • Asenta selection, Deming • 2 • Tags: A3, Deming, Focused factory, Functional department, Job rotation, Silo, Value Stream