Manufacturing Competetiveness

Last week on Friday, 7th November 2013, during the national quality summit organized by the CII, lot of discussions were held about the manufacturing competitiveness in India.

I thought of writing this blog to record my thoughts of the enormous HIDDEN potential we have in our country that can be harnessed to reach great heights.

I would like to start by stating our JUGAD ability as a huge strength to improvise, that we learn from a very early age due to a huge uncertainty in the daily routine. This surely is not the case with the countries dominated by manufacturing industry. Are we using this huge JUGAD potential???

Let me share my views about the competence and qualification. We all know that we need to have exceptional merit or connections, good resources,.... to get qualified. On the other hand, ones landing in Industrial Training Institutes not necessarily are incapable. Thus it is really not uncommon, especially to have the fresh graduates as front line managers with significantly less competence that the workmen. Thus the FRONT LINE MANAGERS normally have a role of leading senior and more intelligent subordinates. Even with a good lot of leadership experience this kind of a team to lead is quite challenging. Just imagining their condition and their effectiveness. It is quite interestingly different in the advanced manufacturing economies, where education in based on merit and generally the less capable ones end up as workers, making the life of Front Line Managers easier. Do our workmen need FRONT LINE MANAGERS???

In all the advanced manufacturing countries the basic livelihood is not endangered, since arbitrary firing is not easy and even if a worker were to be fired, the social security system supports in some way. Whereas in India, unfortunately, many companies, the big ones, pride themselves in flexible manpower - outsourced CONTRACT workmen who can be "Hired and Fired" at will. Some companies come up with similar models but with different terminology of "On Job Trainees", Temporaries, etc. Just imagine what would be going through a worker who is either a temporary or a contract workmen for years - sometimes > 10 Y. Will these CONTRACT workmen be engaged with the company???

Imagine how it would be when we get the workmen fully engaged by first ensuring PEOPLE QUALITY and DIGNITY before product/service quality.
Imagine how it would be if we get our workmen to take on some coordinating roles on rotation to become a SELF MANAGING TEAM without the front line manager.
Imagine a system of remuneration based on CONTINUOUS LEARNING and TEACHING using the Jugad abilities.

The enormous hidden potential can in my opinion only be released provided we relook at some conventional wisdom, like our payment systems, hierarchical structure, accountability for down stream performance, etc. You may want to check out the functional value stream, BITS and Timeout in the following L2L system presentation.

 

Role and Goal Clarity

The most important factor that ensures good team work is establishing the role and goal clarity, especially as the organisations go bigger. Bigger in this context would even mean just be more than 20-30 people. Let me use an analogy to explain this success factor.

Imagine an Orchestra where the individual musicians aren’t clear what their role and goal is. Role would be to play an instrument and the goal would be to strictly adhere to the music notes as well as to the conductor’s instructions, mostly visual in nature. Jazz on the contrary is impromptu music where the number of musicians involved is far lesser and thus apart from some overall understanding clarity is not really necessary.

When organisations are small I would refer them as a Jazz band, where not having role and goal clarity in itself is an advantage to allow everyone to perform to excellence only with an overall understanding. As organisations get bigger they move towards an Orchestra. Have you been to any Orchestra with around 50 musicians without music notes in front of them or without a conductor?

However when it comes to organisations, especially during the ramping up phase, very normally neither is the need for role and goal clarity appreciated nor do the employees are convinced in needing the role and goal clarity. The result obviously is a huge hit to both the top and bottom line as well as huge problems in any kind of healthy team work with everyone wondering why we aren’t able to deliver the same way as when we were smaller.

Role Clarity is established by thoughtfully (considering the necessary interfaces with the other functions and hierarchy levels) crafting the Job Descriptions that then must be approved by a cross functional leadership team. The Goal Clarity is established by defining the Goals of the organisation and then the individual functions in an interactive session involving the leadership team. The key here is to involve the entire leadership team so that the Goal conflicts, quite common in organisations, are addressed openly and the Goals appropriately modified. Once the roles and goals are thus established, the deployment can then be done to all the employees in a cascaded manner through the hierarchy.

My next blog will be on the next success factor of using structured reviews to meet the goals.