From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 13:52:23 MDT
Mike,
Good post. You wrote: "I think some of my ideas may squeeze out
middle management, as corporate executives could become increasing less
reliant on middle manager interpretations of the actual conditions on the
floor. Despite the instability such potential loss of employment might cause,
I remain more worried about how such fine-grain measurement may be used."
I hope we are staying on the same page but I began working in
manufacturing in 1951. I retired in 1999. Along the way I got a BS and an
MBA in the quantitative side of manufacturing and worked almost every
position on the organization chart from production worker out on the floor to
plant manager.
After all that experience I became aware that we define the goal of
the manufacturing organization as productivity but except for the Macro level
we have no definitin of productivity that the average manufacturing manager
can use.
As a consequence most of the managers I see seem to be hired, retained
and promoted chiefly for their ability to track production and on occasion to
expedite various customers orders. But no one knows how productive
manufacturing is. It is obvious to me that top management is very sensitive
to whether orders are being filled but not whether or not the factory is
productive.
However I reacted mostly to you saying that top management might
become less reliant upon middle management to inform them of their status.
Can you imagine what would happen if top management actually knew how
things were going? I have knowledge of a couple of systems that do exactly
that to one extent or another but in my experience top management seems very
reluctant to push the issue.
So we keep getting firms that move overseas to find cheap labor. That
is a nice firm number that can be determined. Yet when I have done studies
to determine productivity I have never found that productivity was over about
33%. I have seen it as low as 15%. I have also measured productivity in
plants where through automization management was sure their productivity was
high. In those instances it was easy to find large bits of the day where the
workers shut the automated machinery down for this or that.
But yes, I would like to see a plant where top management knew what
the heck was going on.
Ron h
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