A Solution or an Adventure?

It is vitally important to know the difference between a solution and an adventure. It may seem like an obvious and trite distinction. However, knowing the difference allows you to not only gain perspective, it also lets you decide which path you would like to take. I’d like to share a memory from early in my career with you today. It’s something I have thought about many times in the years since then. It has always been useful and fruitful to think about. I was in an important meeting one day in a major manufacturing company. We were all deciding how to move forward on our yield-improvement project at a manufacturing plant. I was teamed up with a very capable senior engineer; he was very familiar with the process and the equipment. The senior engineer had been working on the equipment for a while, and he had come to the conclusion that the machining of a key piece of equipment had to be improved significantly, by an order of magnitude. This meant a big and tricky machining upgrade. Very hard materials needed to be machined to tolerances of 0.0001 inches, a difficult and expensive proposition. The senior engineer was sure that this ultrahigh precision machining was absolutely required to significantly improve the yield. This mild-mannered senior engineer explained to the roomful of management folks what was needed and why. There was not much enthusiasm in the room for the ultra-precise machining and the attendant expenses. People wanted to keep doing what we were doing, but still get an improvement. This approach didn’t make sense to the senior engineer. The senior engineer got the attention of all of the folks in the room and said to them:

“We can either have a solution or an adventure but not both”.

The senior engineer meant that we were currently on an adventure: a nice trip, fun and pleasant, but not one certain to improve the yield. In fact, if we stayed on the current path, we would not see improvements. However, if we all agreed to focus and provide the proper resources and implementation, the yield improvement was “ours to have”. The senior engineer viewed this as the only reliable, durable, and sensible solution.

The “solution versus adventure” distinction immediately clarified the thinking of all the people in the room. The management team could not have the benefits of a yield improvement without providing the resources to make it happen. The “solution versus adventure” way of thinking made it clear to everybody what was required and why. The management team quickly and enthusiastically approved the expenditures for the ultra-precision machining. The improved machining was developed and very successfully implemented in the production operation. By using the improved equipment and optimizing the process operation, annual bottom-line savings in excess of $2 million were realized. This project had an ROI well above 2,000%. My learning from the senior engineer was the clear difference between a solution and an adventure. Realizing this distinction has been hugely beneficial to me as I have worked on many subsequent technology project “emergency situations” and other process improvement efforts.

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YOUR CHALLENGE THIS WEEK

Reflect on the state of your key processes and the improvements that have been made to them over the past few years…

• Have your latest process improvement projects been solid solutions or adventures?

• What are the root causes of this situation?Is your knowledge of your process sufficient to know how to develop solid solutions, based on current, trusted and reliable data?

• Is your equipment consistently and reliably serving the needs of the process? How do you know this?

I’d enjoy hearing about your process “solutions” or “adventures”! As always, you can just contact me and I’ll get back to you promptly.

All the Best, Marty

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