BRICKS or SPRINKLERS?

The bricks I’m talking about are building bricks, the kind used to build a house.

The sprinklers I’m talking about are not the kind of sprinklers the kids run through in the summer, but the sprinklers used to put out a fire, usually in a commercial building.

These things are metaphors for preventative (bricks) and contingent (sprinklers) actions.

If you build a house out of bricks, it will prevent a fire because the bricks are not combustible.

Sprinklers are tremendously useful if you have a fire. They can douse and extinguish a fire, which can save the entire building!

How can this help us build robust processes that win? Let’s think about things from the Process Perspective.

Preventative (brick type) actions for building great processes include:

• Customer samples: understand if you can repeatedly make the desired samples for the customer or if you got “lucky” with a Rembrandt sample.

• Design for Manufacturability: this must be assessed early, routinely, and ruthlessly.

• Design reviews of the PROCESS (using Axiomatic Analysis, for example) to understand how inherently coupled the process is.

• Iterate on the process, just like equipment iterations.

• Measurements and metrics: developing useful and meaningful metrics, understanding the measurement capability.

Contingent (sprinkler type) actions for dealing with manufacturing processes include:

• Apologizing to customers for defective products.

• Emergency teams to deal with process problems of significant importance to annoyed customers, daily updates to irritated customer to provide assurance to them.

• Responding to process upsets by asking for specification relief from the customers because the process is not capable.

• Sorting and inspection to provide samples to customers: “quality” via inspection (which never really works).

• Quarantines for defective products.

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My main learning is the utility of thinking of our process building efforts in terms of bricks (preventative) versus sprinkler (contingent) actions. Seasoned process builders know the importance of emphasizing preventative over contingent actions. This distinction is vitally important, because robust processes must be constructed to prevent problems before they arise. Using this mindset, we can build margin into the process, so it is inherently reliable, robust, and dependable.

Thanks to Allen Weiss (the very well-known entrepreneurial coach) for his insight in pointing out the importance of emphasizing preventative over contingent actions.

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CHALLENGE TO READERS

Please think about your own and your organizations’ efforts building manufacturing processes over the past 10 years, chat with some of your colleagues about this…

• How have your efforts been split between preventative and contingent actions? Do you have specific examples of each from projects of importance?

• Look at your current process building efforts. Do you have enough preventative actions or do you need to add more?

The systematic prevention of process problems is at the heart of Process Stewardship and Process Excellence. Please call me (508-410-8081) so we can compare notes and learnings, and discuss how MPES Consulting can dramatically accelerate your progress.

If you send us an email, we will get back to you promptly. Thanks!

All the Best,

Marty

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