Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1265351
54 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2020 that shiny object of technology that you've deployed. Matties: We always say attack processes—not people—because if you're attacking processes, you're focusing on the right spot. If you're attacking people, you're placing blame where it doesn't belong because most errors are pro- cess-related. People inherently want to do a good job. Murphy: Perfectly said. All too often, histor- ically, people are guilty by association with those processes, and boy did we have that wrong. Matties: Yes, and there are many examples where we blame people when it was process failure. Back to the meetings and the structure, there are two parts: what you do and how you do it. In meetings you have, there's a process of having a meeting, and oftentimes, it's hard to be involved in the content of the meeting and facilitate the meetings. Do you have facili- tators, or do you train facilitators to help peo- ple through the meeting process? Murphy: We do, but I would not say every meeting has a facilitator if you think of the routine events that occur within the four walls of manufacturing plants. But if there's a new, customer-inspired need for us to do something differently—faster, better, or whatever the case would be—we have folks who are very capable of facilitating teams as we navigate through that continuous improvement oppor- tunity. How do we leverage the available infor- mation, technology, and analytics, and how do we involve the people interacting with those processes in a thoughtful fashion? How do they own the change that we want to see happen as the customer that asked for it in the first place or the person that got assigned that objective in their performance review? We respect the fact that there are people who are gifted with the ability to marshal others through change in an engaging and inspiring fashion, and we try and employ them as much as we possibly can. I don't want to leave the impression that every meeting has a facilitator, but the prudent use of them is something we have learned to respect within our operations. Matties: The other area of managing people is accountability. Accountability is one area that we often fall short on because we don't like conflict. How do you deal with accountability in your continuous improvement culture? Murphy: We let the information speak for itself, so we're accountable because we declare what our objectives are within our processes and plants, and they roll up in a pyramid ultimately of what matters for the customer. But we share that data of how we're performing completely transparently. I mentioned this before, but it was not common in our history to share the process capability outcomes of one plant to another. There weren't many people who were accountable across plants and drawing com- parisons was a risky business with such widely differing KPIs and measurement points being employed. Now, however, we avail process capability metrics to everybody in the same fashion—including the associates, supervisors, and engineers—and our global process owners are chartered with lifting every location's per- formance up through the work they do. Lever- aging that available and trusted information and insights has become integral to our suc- cess. The real-time and really accurate nature of it inspires confidence and trust. Everyone who needs to has access to it, so there's no place for us to hide whatever it's telling us, so there's built-in accountability. Largely gone are the days where someone simply works in one station on one line, conducting a task that doesn't require them to even look to the left or right.