This assignment will be around Special Product which is part of engineering organization of Cummins Turbo Technology .Special Products is a manufacturing area within Cummins Turbo Technology that specializes in non-production work like prototypes and tooling. By nature of its role special products deals with small batch quantities and non-repetitive work. It’s customers tend to be internal to Cummins Turbo Technology like engineering and the production area itself.
The Manufacturing Process of Special Product is a low volume and high variant Production Hence; all the Models go on with different programming and different setups. Special products prototype turbocharger assembly is seeing an increase in customer demand for prototype turbochargers.
2) Input out transformation Model
Ref : LUBS5663M
The need for sales prototypes originates with a request from the external customer. Special Products will ultimately manufacture any prototype components and assemble the turbo using some production items. In summary:-
• The engineer will create a drawing, assign a ‘V’ part number for the turbo and enter the BOM (Bill of Material) and build information onto the prototype specification summary .
• The NPI co-coordinator will setup the V number in oracle engineering, along with a dummy routing.
• Sales will enter the sales order for the turbo onto oracle system .
• Purchasing will order any required material / parts for the build
• The NPI co-coordinator will setup any other items in Engineering on oracle. Using the bill of material specified by the engineer, he will also setup the BOM for the turbo within oracle.
• The full prototype specification summary , and drawings for manufactured prototype components will be issued to special products
• Using information provided from special products and purchasing on estimated delivery dates, Sales will provide a final delivery date for the customer. (Special products work on two weeks from receipt of material to produce the prototype component(s), plus one week to build, pack and ship the turbos).
The request to special product takes the form of a drawing and the prototype specification summary. Any materials / parts for both the manufactured prototype components and the assembly will be arranged by the NPI coordinator.
The methods by which requests come in to special products from their internal customers. The major customers, Engineering (for prototype components), Sales (for prototype components and turbos), Operation Engineers (for Jig & Tools) and Production (for products where no machinery in production anymore, eg old product for aftermarket) are described in some detail for completeness.
2.1) A System View
Ref : LUBS5663M
An Charter called Special Products System Review was created to address a number of issues in and around special products. The Charter can be found in. The main reasons for the charter are :-
1. Currently there is little (or no) knowledge on how the systems and processes work within Special Products.
2. There seems to be a long lead-time for requesting products from Special Products, and the delivery of them to the requestor.
3. There are no visible updates/tracking to understand where requests are at any point in time.
4. There is no knowledge about how the costing system works for Special Products, and therefore an unease that we may be charging the customer incorrectly.
Planning Change
Based on interviews stakeholder want the ability to track their delivery to a level of detail that gives them the queue position, expected completion date– this in turn lets them communicate back to their customers and also plan their workload.
Voices of the customer based on interview
The amount of weak process and adherence of process in the system introduces a significant amount of noise which reduces our ability to control and predict delivery date as required by our customers.
We need to introduce some new measures into the process which will allow for further analysis of issues to understand their impact and to facilitate any necessary preventative actions. We must meet the functional needs of the business by providing a reliable and robust, accessible system to allow for an effective coordination of the Special Product delivery information and rapid access to data with clear and concise state of the project , within an intuitive, easy to use and customisable environment.
Objective of Changes :
1) At the end of each month release the Special Products report showing the special products throughput for each major customer (ie Sales, Production and Engineering).
2) Resource utilization – Man and Machine
3) Right First time measures – Quality
How we can meet the above objective:
1. Capacity Planning
The area of capacity planning has been discussed within special products. There is no proposal to provide any capacity planning tool or process, but it may be of interest to see the main reasons why:-
• The nature of Special Products means that very little advance warning is given for requests for work.
• Estimating times for each operation within the machining process is very time consuming.
There is lot of pushback from the employees as this will take the freedom of completing the job at their own wish and as on today there is no measure to define the operation efficiency, man/machine utilization .
2. Improved visibility of potential demand
It would be beneficial to Special Products to see potential demand from all of it’s internal customers as soon as possible to better plan their workload. (For production this could possibly be achieved by setting the Business category to special products for all items made totally within special products – thinking of stock availability reports?)
Since there is no clear visibility of demand most of the work become urgent and thus leading to overtime. Clear improved visibility will improve the department finance but at the same time will stop the institutional overtime.
3. Improved visibility of job progress/status
It would be beneficial to the internal customers of special products to see progress/status of their requests. Also if any rejection at any part of the process will also be recorded which in turn will help to record and back flush the scrap material to ensure stock level accuracy .
Potential fear of losing the freedom, loss of power – as visibility of job means system gives visibility to customer and no favoritism and out of process support.
To meet the above objectives Special Product needs to drive improvement in delivery performance to its customers. This will be achieved by moving the business forward through improvement against existing set way of working.
Managers and employees do not perform their duties in value free vacuum, their work and the way it’s done is governed, directed and tempered by the organization culture (Burns 2004).
There are three principal factors affecting the culture of organization , these are :
1) The founder Basic assumption
2) The national culture
3) The task in hand
(Gargan D. 2005)
Changing the culture of Special Product is an extremely difficult due to people thinking and peer pressure of the employees being with Special product for long years. The intricacies of culture and office politics are potentially huge. There are numerous factor affecting the change to happen such as environment, politics, leadership and organization structure and all are important to be addressed. The key area I am focused on the organization structure and developing measures to support the change improvement initiatives by Changing
1) Organization Structure : To establish and redefine the Org Structure to establish clear responsibility and accountability and Improve administrative behaviour, responsiveness, skill and capacity to accomplish necessary task.
Above change in structure was established to ensure the synergy in the department and improve flow of information essential to an organization’s success. With this organization structure ensure that individuals and departments that need to coordinate their efforts have lines of communication that are built into the structure before there was only supervisor below manager and rest team report to him and in new Organization structure reporting relationships will be clear and all members of the organization understand what their responsibilities area and know to whom they are accountable.
2) Job design: To meet the objective and the structure change to improve the performance, it is also become equally important to alter the task and authority relationship which means change in the Job design.
In my view way job design to be structured should be as below so as to motivate people to acquire more skills which keep them motivated.
This “traditional “ approach to job design stems from a philosophy called scientific management or Taylorism , which standardize methods and minimization of costs in the design work (F.W Taylor(1911)
In the 20th century as a machine-shop foreman he felt that workers consistently under produced, and the way to prevent was :
1) Systematically compile information about the work
2) Remove workers discretion and control over own activities
3) Simplify task as much as possible
4) Specify standard procedure and time for task completion
In my view this theory is more of to ensure that worker could not deceive manager or hide from them but the other dimension is not being considered in the theory how we can make the worker behave like the owners.
The way I have designed the job based on the process map (refer figure below) which for sure covers some of the concept of Taylor’s scientific management theory and also results of investigation by Morgeson and Campion (2002) to make the design job efficient and motivating . In my view
Job design Is…
• Intended to be an employee development tool to help employees identify and prioritize their key development needs.
• Intended to provide leaders with a broad and accurate view of information.
• Intended to give broad skills to leaders, which are tied to jobs.
• Intended to provide employees with learning/development events that will help them further develop their skill set.
• Intended to house all of the roles and the skills for the Engine Business Unit.
• Intended to identify skill gaps for FE leaders and managers in their areas, which will allow them to provided training for their departments.
• Intended to be a more efficient process to gather information regarding “best fit” reports and skill gap reports.
• Provide a common profile for conducting organizational assessment
Job design Is Not…
• A job promotion tool.
• Intended to effect performance job ratings.
• Intended to be the sole job/candidate search database.
• Increase/Decrease an employee’s pay.
• Intended to affect someone’s current role.
• Intended to replace the current hiring practices and hiring methods.
.
As a step of job design is to Map the complete process and start work on value added work and required non value added work to structure in the job design. In my view this is an important activity as this will help the team to take the ownership and with complete understanding of usefulness of the job description also to decide on job rotation, horizontal job enlargement and vertical job enlargement.
At the end of each month the Special Products report showing the special products throughput for each major customer (ie Sales, Production and Engineering). The reports show the part number for each job that was completed that month, along with the ‘in date’, ’due date’, ‘start date’ and the actual finish date. The time taken to complete the job (ie the working days between the start date and the finish date) and the days late/early (ie the difference between the due date and the finish date, excluding non-working days) are also calculated. Three measurement figures are then provided, which are Average leadtime in days, Total number of jobs and Total number of jobs late. An Example is shown below.
Special Products Throughput for Production
Part Number In Date Due Date Start Date Finish Date Time Against
3535033 30-MAR-12 20-APR-12 02-APR-12 19-APR-12 10 0
3590380 07-MAR-11 23-MAR-12 08-MAR-12 19-APR-12 28 16
3590380 07-MAR-12 02-APR-21 19-MAR-12 19-APR-12 21 11
3756412 28-FEB-12 16-MAR-12 05-MAR-12 11-APR-12 26 17
3762871 14-MAR-12 30-MAR-12 15-MAR-12 26-MAR-12 6 -3
Avg Leadtime in days 18.2
Total Number of Jobs 5
Total Number of Jobs late 3
On a yearly basis the same process is carried out, to give throughput and averages over the year.
To produce these reports requires the operations manager to manually enter the information from the special products route cards into excel, which is rather time consuming.
Issues and Improvements
1 Special Products Measures
The manual task of generating the monthly and yearly throughput figures, is quite an overhead, and does not make the information easily available for other analysis. It is therefore proposed that :-
• The In Date, Start Date, Due Date and Lab Ops number that are normally hand written on the special products route card, be entered against the oracle WDJ as it is ready to start.
• This information can then be used to develop an oracle report that will calculate and print the throughput and measures for special products. The report will be setup so it can be run at any time, for any time period, for any (or all) internal customers. (sounds like a martini)
• With this information available within the oracle system, further analysis reports could be developed like :-
• delays due to material
• trend of demand on special products
• plus the information can then be made available for ad-hoc enquiries / analysis within the oracle Discoverer tool.
Lesson Learned ::
• Is a change inevitable, necessary or even advantageous?
• What resources can help me creatively re-frame or improvise new approaches to a situation?
• What are the risks and options I should consider before taking action?
• What lessons have I learned from change-related experiences that can be applied to similar situations?
• Who are the stakeholders affected by the situation and their potential area of concern.
• Assist direct reports in working through the transitions that accompany all changes, but do not ignore performance that is not up to standard.
• Provide a safe environment for people to share their feelings and perspectives. Be very attentive to the needs of your direct reports and stay involved.
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