Monthly Archives: March 2012

Team targets or individual targets? Does in matter for Operational Excellence?

Team targets are essential for making Lean, Lean Six Sigma and Super7 Operations work.

Despite the increasing popularity of Six Sigma as an effective improvement methodology, many Six Sigma projects fail to deliver expected savings. The topmost reason why Six Sigma projects fall short of expectations is a lack of management engagement at the right level of the organization.

While a lack of commitment and sponsorship is the leading cause of project short falls, there are several other important reasons for project short falls, including:

  • Lack of team cohesion and leadership
  • Lack of effective project monitoring mechanism such as setting of targets and monitoring
  • Difficulty leading distributed teams
  • Improper motivation to associates
  • Differences between employees
  • Non cooperation in both horizontal and vertical due to individual targets

To overcome above mentioned problems and to achieve six sigma targets and benefits top management has to set up group targets and incentives accordingly with the help of HR team, yearly appraisals, bonuses and individual key performance indicators (KPI’s) metrics also should have reflection of team achievements. Hence all major organizations are setting group targets and group incentive plans to achieve six sigma goals and targets.

Cooperational Excellence: what’s in a name?

Cooperational Excellence: People working toghether in small teams to create excellence in your operation. This may be nothing new under the sun for manufacturing and assembly plants: mini-factories, autonomous teams, u-cell manufacturing, quality circles etc. have become the standard in the last decenia. Especially in automotive, where off course Toyota still sets the standards (Toyota Production System).

In creating Service Excellence, these methCooods and organisational principles haven’t been applied so widely. Recently, I have implemented autonomous teams in a back-office of a large financial service provider, with even for me unexpected success: costs are down, queues and ‘inventory’ have almost completely dissapeared – which means waiting times for the customer times have also – and employees and management are enthousiastic about esponsiblitly on the ‘shop floor’ instead  top-down management control.

I have named this, the application of manufacturing-style teamwork in administration and service, cooperational excellence: working toghether in small teams in close cooperation, to achieve operational excellence.

If you want to know more, contact me, or just check regularly for new posts on this website!