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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
February 2019 #11235 Page #18
Too Many Companies Struggle with Making Process Changes Todd Drummond
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statement far too managers make is that they are not able to get their employees to embrace change. If your company struggles with making changes in any given area, just keep in mind that real change always comes from the top down. If your company is struggling with change and you are the top dog, the solution starts with you. Every company should have as a goal that improvement is not an option but rather a must-change-to-stay-competitive-or-we-will-fail mentality. The Japanese word for this idea of “good change” is kaizen. Most companies who embrace lean manufacturing practices simply refer to this as being continuous improvement. Failure examples: Sometimes people within a company want to improve their given area of responsibility, but they have no real power to do so. In other words, they do not have management’s authority to implement the needed change. Improvement often requires responsibility shifts to implement a change of current practices. Thus, all too often a game of “protection of perceived power” within each group will happen instead, stifling change. Another issue is that change requires effort even though everyone is already tasked with a very busy workload. Few want to give up their current practices, believing only the other departments need to make any type of change. Newbies to the continuous improvement process often resort to doing their best to show how much the overall organization will benefit from the changes, but without true buyin from everyone, along with the backing of better management practices, it is a total waste of time. These companies are typically rife with executive top-down micro-management, and over the many years of that type of management practices, the employees have been conditioned never to take ownership or to offer suggestions for improvement. More often than not, these types of companies view a major equipment purchase as the one thing that will make all the difference. Typically, an equipment purchase is biased toward the recommendation of a company’s current Continued next page
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