Among my career experiences I was fortunate to work in marketing for a period of time when a new VP was hired to bring organizational leadership to the business development process. The first thing he did was hunker down in his office with several members of his staff, dissecting the business development status of the company. After a couple weeks he emerged from his office to give a presentation to the staff, explaining that the first thing he does when he takes on new responsibilities is to put the challenge into perspective.

As I mentioned, this is a mature program with significant challenges. Taking my cue from this former manager, I pulled my usual post-MRP-run reports: Backlog, Planned Orders, Open Orders, On-Hand Inventory. I normally lay the data out in Excel and do the math: how many units have to be built, how many units are on-hand, how many units are being built in the open orders, and how many units remain to be built. Simply put, the way production scheduling and MRP work is:

On-Hand Inventory + Open Orders + Planned Orders = Backlog

Anything else, and you have a problem.

So, I pulled the data expecting to see everything balance and my challenge would be a function of lead time and material availability. Except, the data wasn’t adding up correctly.

By the end of the first 14-hr day I’d found some major human errors that had contributed to a portion of the problem. Once corrected and MRP was re-run, the numbers still weren’t adding up. By the end of the second day I’d found an open order that wasn’t consuming material properly. Once I showed it to my manager, she diagnosed the specific problem in about 30 seconds. I won’t go into it here because it was human error, not system error (although it would have been nice if the system hadn’t allowed the error).

So, my “normal” process for getting my arms around program materials responsibilities has been short-circuited. Fixing the issues in the system are beyond my abilities, but I’m fortunate to have a manager with the technical skills to do so and the integrity to shoulder that responsibility rather than pawn it off on me. Even so, this will be the biggest challenge of my career thus far.

I have many weeks of long hours ahead while I try to make sense of the situation from a schedule, capacity, and availability perspective. But as I tell my team, when the system is used properly, time is your friend – eventually, material is ordered properly, arrives on time, and you recover and stabilize.

photo credit: David G. Romero

In contrast to this is planning for a mature product or program. I am taking over a mature program with a family of very complex assemblies on Monday, and this weekend will be spent preparing. Except for when I’ll be watching the Florida-Georgia game. I do have my priorities, after all.

I plan to “live-blog” the process as much as I can without giving away any proprietary information. To set the groundwork, the program is very important to my company’s current and future business and is generally considered a cash-cow. It is not without challenges however; inside lead-time demands, material shortages, and the sub-optimal impacts these have on inventory, operations, and profitability.

Step one in this effort:

Bill of Material (BOM)

Since the products are fairly complex from a technical and process perspective, I need to understand the Bill of Material. I find the best way to do this is to review the backlog and analyze the BOM and construct product trees for each active end item. Yes, I’m sure this exists already, but a few hours spent building it myself is a smart investment that will pay off in a deeper understanding of the product structure.

When I build a product tree, I like to just use Excel and I include the item attributes like:

• Item Number
• Item Description
• Procurement Lead Time (longest component lead time)
• Manufacturing Lead Time
• Fixed Days Supply
• Lot Size

Besides helping me understand the product structure and planning factors, this exposes disconnects between the way a product is planned and the way it is built in real life. For instance, if a product has a Fixed Days attribute set to 10 days, but over time the manufacturing team has found it easier to build in 15 day lots/cycles, the materials organization will always be chasing those last 5 days of components.

I’m not saying that is the case with the program I’m working on, but it is an example of what can be uncovered by doing regular reviews of the BOM.

After I complete this effort I will post again about the next step I’ll take in my preparation. If you have questions, fire away in comments.

Two guys were hiking in the woods when they startled a bear. They took off running, and one guy said to the other “We’re never going to outrun this bear”.

The second said, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”

For years, people in my post-baby-boom generation have been told that the secret to success and happiness is work-life balance. They rank their priorities and consistently (and rightly) place family above work, then interpret “balance” and “priorities” to mean they should be spending as much TIME with their family as they do at work. They make it a point to be at every soccer practice, PTA meeting, and handle their share of the pick-up duties. I myself believed this for many years, right up until I was laid off several years ago.

This is when I learned an important lesson: Placing your family ahead of work in order of importance doesn’t necessarily mean you devote the same amount of TIME and ENERGY to being WITH your family; it means you place your family’s welfare and well-being ahead of work. Believe it or not, your family doesn’t ALWAYS need you around. But, they do need you to provide a home and food and health care and the other necessities of life. And then they need your time. It is work, your job, that provides these things.

Like it or not, there are going to be people that are as good or better than you. There can only be one #1, and if you want to be that star performer, the one that is still around when the layoffs are done, you will have to work harder. Don’t give me that tired old mantra “Work smarter, not harder”. Today it is “Work smarter AND harder“.

There are going to be great periods at work where everything runs smoothly and you’re out of work on time and you’re able to coach the t-ball team. But there are also going to be periods where the challenges are huge, and the winners at work will be the ones that step up and do what is necessary to overcome the challenges. These periods don’t last forever, although sometimes it can feel like they will. So, explain to your family that for the next few months you’re going to miss dinner twice a week, then stick around and take care of that last meeting at 6 pm.

In my current position, I recently transitioned what I do to another plant in my company located in Asia. At the time, I was working my way out of a job but I embraced this and I worked the long hours and made the tough decisions. Late-night conference calls and 4 a.m. email checks, with a ton of complex, difficult work in-between were the norm for several months.  Now, I’ve been entrusted with several programs that have been deemed critical to the future of our business unit in Huntsville, all because I made the choice to work harder and smarter. This is paying off by providing the security my family needs right now, and the opportunity to improve our financial situation despite the worst economic times in our lives.

Lest you think this is a self-congratulating post, allow me to point out that my counterparts in Asia that now work my old program are 12 timezones ahead of me. When I arrive at 7 a.m., I have a full inbox of complex communications, and these continue to come well into my morning. When I leave between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., I’ve already received the first of the emails for the following day. Remember this the next time you wonder why manufacturers build everything they can overseas.