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During the past decade, larger organizations, in the United States and in other countries, have invested heavily in change programs. These programs have ranged from technology shifts, such as the use of computer-aided design and computer-aided process planning tools, to more general shifts in the way business is done, such as implementing total quality management or business process re-engineering. Many have found that the resulting changes are either shortlived or fail to measure up to expectations. Some have even abandoned the change programs before any positive results were produced at all.
Change programs such as statistical process control (SPC) have been widely adopted in manufacturing environments, generally as a consequence of unrelenting external pressure-foreign competition or access to foreign markets in the case of domestic original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and pressure by OEMs in the case of vendors supplying OEMs. Application of SPC and problem-solving tools yields observable and quantifiable benefits in the form of reduced process variation followed by increased productivity. An important reason that SPC generally does deliver the benefits promised is that it is successful at making the underlying causes of quality problems "visible" to the people involved in solving the problems. Furthermore, causes and effects are closely related in time and space in a typical manufacturing environment.
This article describes a case in which systems tools, in addition to simple quality tools, helped participants in a change program make the underlying causes of poor performance visible. When the systemic causes of poor performance were known, the group was able to maintain its focus on developing solutions. That prevented participants from being misled during periods of tension and pressure into thinking that the change program itself was the root cause of the poor performance and from losing interest in making the change program succeed.
The following case study involved an OEM that adopted a change program to improve cycle time. The corporatewide program was initiated in response to intense competitive pressure. During off-peak periods, the program provided engineers and staff with training in team skills, cross-functional communication, and in the concepts and techniques used to design for manufacturability. The cycle time reduction goal that this change program was designed to meet included a tenfold reduction in engineering changes originating from downstream functional...
