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More Manufacturing Industry Insight from Paul Hogendoorn, FreePoint Technologies Founder:

“..I’m continuing the top 10 tips gleaned from successful companies and leaders that I’ve worked with over my 40-year career.  Although the two tips shared in this column are very similar and intricately related, they are also critically distinct.”
~Paul Hogendoorn, Founder

“If you want something important done, ask a busy person.”

A colleague on a church board once said to me many years ago, when the two of us were assigned a task, “If you want to get something important done, ask a busy person.”

Here’s why that’s a great tip for a manufacturing setting.  Truly busy people in manufacturing have a knack for getting things done.  They are not looking to put new things on their list but instead are trying to find the quickest way to get an item off their list.  Yes, there are people in manufacturing that know how to make themselves busy or keep themselves busy, but successful company leaders innately know the difference between routinely busy people and truly busy people that get things done.  How do I know this is true?  Easy.  A task that is critical and needs to get done seldom gets assigned to a person with a track record of managing never-ending projects that seem to go on.  They get assigned to people trusted to deliver an outcome.  Without even deliberately knowing they delegate tasks in this way, they do.

Truly busy people know how to delegate, when to stay out of the way and when to roll up their sleeves and just do it themselves.  Their focus is on getting the important tasks done and making themselves less busy.  Routinely busy people are looking to remain busy, and often without knowing they are doing it, they keep tasks open and keep themselves positioned as a critical communications conduit.  They resist closing the task out to get assigned another task, or worse (in their minds), have no important task assigned to them.  Truly busy people don’t have this aversion, because as soon as they have any bandwidth at all, other important tasks are assigned (or reassigned) to them.  What I’ve observed over the last four decades is that most progressive company and department leaders already instinctively know this.  They just aren’t aware of it.  The key is to not burn out your truly busy people.  Instead, let them graduate up the ranks as they succeed, confident that there is another high-achieving candidate ready to follow their lead and fill their shoes.
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Successful manufacturers build on the people that take them forward.  As they empower, enable and grow the people, they build their businesses.  The company’s culture encourages its people to imagine, plan and persist on finding ways to move forward.
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“Leaders find a way.”

The second tip comes from someone I was also on a board with.  We faced many challenging situations together.  His closing mantra was “leaders find a way”.  And indeed, they do.  The leader is not the person with the position or title, or the education, or the letters behind their name.  The leader is simply the person that finds a way when others don’t or can’t.  In all of our workplaces, there are many people that can point out the reasons why something can’t get done.  In fact, we often admire, empower, and even promote individuals that have great abilities to foresee or articulate problems that others can’t see.  But how does that get a company ahead?

At best, it keeps the company from going backwards – It doesn’t pull the company forward.  Many managers are to some degree inclined to keep companies from going backwards, but leaders are more often inclined to find a way forward. There are leaders in every organization, in roles up and down the org chart.  In the most successful organizations I have come across, the people that find a way (leaders) are supported, encouraged and appreciated.  In less successful organizations, the folks that have a knack for finding a way become discouraged and move on.  A leader’s true role is to develop new leaders.  A successful company’s culture fosters and encourages people to imagine, plan and persist on finding ways to move forward.

This is a key differentiator that I’ve observed that sets successful thriving manufacturers apart.  They build on the people that take them forward.  As they empower, enable and grow those people, they build their businesses.

Who are those people in your organization – the ones that find a way and get things done?  Are you building on them?

Paul Hogendoorn co-founded FreePoint Technologies with the goal of giving manufacturers the benefit of information technologies that inform, empower and motivate their most critical asset – their people.

Access Paul’s full series of Leading For Success: Tips in Manufacturing Automation Magazine here: https://www.automationmag.com/author/paul-hogendoorn/

@AutomationMag #SmartManufacturing #Industry40 #IIoT #MESsystem #MachineMonitoringSystem #ContinuousImprovement #ManufacturingAutomation #LeanManufacturing

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More Manufacturing Industry Insight from Paul Hogendoorn, FreePoint Technologies Founder:

“..I’m continuing the series of sharing tips I’ve learned from manufacturing companies and leaders I had the privilege of working with that were clearly succeeding and thriving, rather than just surviving. The tips are the best things I gleaned from them. The idea behind this series is to share all so everyone can do even better.”
~Paul Hogendoorn, Founder

In the first column, the tips were: “Don’t make a big production of it”, and “Your people are the smartest people in the room”. The two tips in the previous column were “What gets measured gets improved” and “You can get a lot more done when you don’t care who gets the credit.” They all seem relatively straightforward, but there’s more to it than just an easy-to-remember slogan.

“Digitize your proven processes first.”

A common and expensive mistake many companies make is that they tamper with proven plant floor processes in order to digitize them to achieve their stated Industry 4.0 goals. The mistaken belief is that it’s okay to change an effective plant floor process to accommodate a new digitized system, and the new process with a digitized system will be inherently better than the current process with an older manual system. This is a mistake on two counts. The first is that you may have reduced the effectiveness of a fairly effective production process, and you make money on the production process, not on the administration process. The second is that you will likely have made gaining buy-in on the implementation of any new digital system even harder to achieve by starting out on the wrong foot.

There’s a natural tendency to leave working processes alone and tackle problem areas first. However, in this case, it’s better to eliminate one major project variable by digitizing a process that you know already works. You are not trying to do two complicated things at the same time by introducing a paradigm-shifting technology and trying to fix a broken process. Fixing a broken process is a major task and objective by itself, as is digitizing a working process. For your whole Industry 4.0 plant floor digitization plan to have the best success, you need an early win. Digitizing a manufacturing administration process that you already know works well (checklists, scheduling, buy-off forms, etc.) can get you that early win. Taking on a broken process and trying to fix it with technology could stall your digitization initiative or send it in the wrong direction.

“Know your internal customer, and what’s in it for them.”

The larger an organization is, the more layers there are, and the more important this tip becomes. Advancing an idea or trying to get something critical done often means moving the conversation up the ladder one rung at a time. Or, it may mean delegating it down, but again, one rung at a time. Each rung on the ladder has a different stakeholder with a different agenda. A few years ago, my company’s marketing department developed a “persona chart” to help our sales team be more successful by aligning their pitch and terminology with the audience they were addressing. Seeing it all laid out on a single chart revealed how complex manufacturing organizations really are, and how important it is to understand “what’s in it” for everyone on the other ladder rungs.

On the far left of the persona chart are the machine operators and “value-adding, hands-on” people in your organization. On the far right is the C-suite, with the CEO on the very far right. In between, you have supervisors, department managers, plant managers, CI, maintenance and other functional managers, and perhaps division managers. The two main things that change as you go from left to right are the metric of concern and the period of interest. On the left, the metric of interest is parts, cycles, and rate, and the period is this hour, this shift, this day. On the far right, the metric is financial and the time view is this quarter, this year, this stage. On the left, the interest is personal financial security and stability. On the right, it’s profitability, sustainability and growth. On the rungs in between, it’s somewhere in the middle. Knowing how to advance your cause up the ladder, or delegate an objective down the ladder, requires a good understanding of what constitutes success for all the folks you are working with. The better you understand their position and what’s in it for them, the better your chance of achieving collective success.

Paul Hogendoorn co-founded FreePoint Technologies with the goal of giving manufacturers the benefit of information technologies that inform, empower and motivate their most critical asset – their people.

Access Paul’s full series of Leading For Success: Tips in Manufacturing Automation Magazine here: https://www.automationmag.com/author/paul-hogendoorn/

#SmartManufacturing #Industry40 #MachineMonitoringSystem #IIoT #ManufacturingExecutionSystem #MESsystem #ContinuousImprovement #ManufacturingAutomation #DowntimeTracking #OEE #LeanManufacturing