The challenges facing manufacturers today are relentless. Rising competition from international players, increasing regulations on personal safety, data protection and technology adoption, customer pressure, discrepancies in cost, quality, delivery, and ever-increasing wage demands make running a manufacturing plant extremely challenging.
Running a manufacturing business requires extreme organisational skills. The organisation must begin with a clear understanding of the value that customers require. It must then support that value by establishing standards in terms of specification, quality, delivery, and reliability. This is then followed by the assembly of a team that will coordinate all the activity, and continuous development of processes that will deliver the value to maintain a competitive advantage. Now add suppliers, logistics, regulation, management, and globalisation.
That is a mammoth task, and one can now understand the need for those extreme organisational skills from the outset.
Achieving extreme organisation is a complex system, but it can be described in five dimensions:
Understanding these five dimensions is not too difficult. Though in order to effectively implement them, business leaders should keep in mind these three points:
1. Consistency – a consistent approach; daily pressures should not break principles
2. Persistence – reminding everyone, every day what is appropriate; coaching and mentoring
3. Observance – watching all the interactions among team members
You need to be sure you have what it takes to deliver true transformation.
To thrive in this sector in the future, organisations will need to transform their businesses and in some cases completely rethink their place in a supply chain that has become, at times, adversarial but will, in the future, be led by those who collaborate openly.
