Organizational Opportunities from the Frontline Story 26: Challenging the Reactive Mindset | Operational Excellence Quick Hits

In today’s session we’re going to continue on the series on organizational opportunities stories and Lessons Learned From the front lines this is our last story in this series and then we’re going to focus on coaching and the next series is going to be on coaching but today’s story comes to us from a manufacturing company that was a make the stock environment they were dealing with a lot of production pressures to build stock to be able to fulfill customer demand within 24 hours of placement of the order and there’s a lot of issues with downtime unplanned downtime and equipment that was preventing them from keeping equipment up and running and to meet the customer demand and because of unplanned downtime maintenance was constantly reacting to problems and with the pressure to keep production going there wasn’t sufficient time to prevent the solutions but to just Band-Aid the solutions to get the equipment up and running as fast as possible and then how do we go about improving this situation when we have lots of pressures from production to keep stuff going we don’t have the proper time to fix the equipment properly to prevent more unplanned downtime so it’s a situation I see a lot of companies deal with so how do we go about doing that.

So first of all we need the proper mindset for change so first of all conscious awareness is a state of being aware what’s happening in your environment so we’re constantly reacting we’re dealing with problems after they happen how do we change that mindset so the first thing is we’re in that reactive attitude right dealing with issues after they occur now we need a shift in perspective so we need to do something different or think something different or have a different mindset about our current situation or environment to change that environment so in this case the change in Paradigm is understanding the underlying approach or underlying assumptions that are causing the problem and then we want to move to the proactive approach where we focus on preventing issues before they occur so if you have unplanned downtime and equipment that happens sporadically and it’s excessive how do we get out of that reactive mode regardless of the type of problems we’re facing we need to be excellent cause and effects thinking so what does that mean so the effect is the outcome or result or consequence of some actions it’s really the symptoms that we’re dealing with in the organization what is a cause it’s something that brings about the effect or the result what’s the root cause it’s the initiating cause or a condition or a causal change that leads to outcome or effective interest so what we really want to do is get to the root cause but to get to the root cause it takes a lot of effort so a lot of times we don’t have the time to do that so we just put Band-Aid Solutions in place and of course, the problem keeps reoccurring and reoccurring we never get out of that reactive mode of reacting to problems.

So we look at problem-solving one thing we need to understand is not all problems are created equal problems have different levels of severity and depending on that severity we need to focus on those problems that are most critical and not worry about the problems that are trivial or don’t cause us disruptions in our system and so when we look at an organization we want to strive to be have all our processes highly reliable and we take action to deal with problems in a timely manner but the undesirable facts are that resources don’t have sufficient time to do the proper analysis on problems and then resources are overwhelmed with dealing with issues then there’s other tasks that demand the resources time that leads to resources spending a lot of time on non-value-added activities or reacting the problems and then productivity and quality suffer as a result so if we go back to what’s causing that the mindset is all problems are treated with the same level of priority so what we need to do is change that mindset not all problems are created equal so when we look at risk evaluations and we look at problems we need to evaluate the risk of each of those problems according to the performance of the company so from a system perspective and when we look at risk we look at three criteria the first one is the severity so if that problem occurs what’s the severity relative to the disruption to the business not for a process not for a department but for the business so we create a score based on the severity and so the higher the score the more severe effect that has on the company the lower the score the less severity it has and typically that scores somewhere between 1 and 10.

Once you set the severity the severity can never change so you can’t reduce the severity of the failure so that’s one thing we need to understand next we look at the occurrence so the more likely something is to occur we have a higher chance of occurrence the higher that occurrence score is which contributes to the risk assessment and then lastly is the detection so the ability to detect the problem before it happens if we have less ability to detect the problem it gets a higher score so now we take the severity times the occurrence times the detection and that gives us a score or a ranking of the risk to the company each one is scored one to ten you multiply the three together that gives us a risk ranking that we take and we prioritize the highest risk problems first those are the ones we want to focus on putting permanent corrective actions in place because of two things one it happens either frequently or the severity is severe for the company and we don’t have the detection methods to identify when that’s going to happen so when we start looking at this is basically the formula for failure modes and effects analysis or FEMA that we can use for each problem that occurs so when we do that we can start evaluating and putting action priorities based on the highest risk numbers and then we can take that and focus our efforts and focus on the critical few and start putting corrective actions in place to deal with the root cause and eliminate those as problems and so when we start getting a team of people together and we start looking at the problems and in this case, we don’t need to have the equipment down when we’re doing this problem-solving so when we have an issue we need to take the extra time get extra resources to analyze the situation then offline after we get the equipment up and running we can start analyzing the reason for the failures get to the root cause put in countermeasures to prevent those things from occurring and also put detection methods in place so we can detect when there’s an issue before it happens and take the appropriate corrective action before the equipment goes down and so by doing this we’re starting to switch from the reactive mode to the proactive node we must choose one of the best ones to focus on and then the priorities should be on severity first then occurrence and that detection so once we start doing that we switch from that reactive mode to the proactive mode so in this case we took the maintenance department we took engineering we took the supervisor we started spending about an hour a week analyzing the situation collecting data doing some analysis getting to the root cause and putting permanent countermeasures in place to prevent those issues from happening within a few weeks we started to see the number of unplanned downtime issues reduce so that’s where we start to get the free up the time of Maintenance staff to do more proactive stuff and it’s like a snowball rolling downhill so the snowball starts at the top small and starts slow then as it moves it gets bigger and starts to pick up speed and momentum so it’s exactly the same thing what happens when we start switching from the reactive to the proactive it’s difficult at first and then we start to pick up momentum and then it starts to increase speed and it also increases the effectiveness so when we have that proactive mindset using the same logic we did before and all problems aren’t created equal we have a way to prioritize problems and focus and get to the root cause and put permanent countermeasures in place what happens is the objective we strive to be highly reliable all problems are prioritized based on the risk to the organization then the action becomes problems with the highest risk are prioritized then we can focus our resources that have those critical few and get to the root cause and put permanent countermeasures in place the resources have the time to properly deal with the problems because we’re only focused on a critical few then we put permanent Solutions in place there are fewer problems that demand the resources time and then the resources spend more time on value-add activities and productivity and quality increases so this is what we want is that proactive mindset so we saw significant reduction in unplanned downtime but of course, that downtime was converted into productive time and so we started to see increases in productivity so it’s not uncommon to see 20 40 60 80 Improvement in productivity by reducing the unplanned downtime so that’s our session for today thanks for joining again connect with me on LinkedIn visit our website we have all sorts of trainings on different topics and then subscribe to our YouTube channel where we have lots of videos on Exchange and mind shift and how to create a high performing organization