Editor's note: For more about how you can increase and improve communication at your plant, check out Staff Editor Lisa Lupo's Best Practices column in the May/June issue.
The analogy of walls to describe the protection mechanism that managers erect between themselves to purposely separate their departments and roles is also used by Peter Sanderson, President TQMS Inc. and creator of CIS Software in Cornwall, Ontario.
In his allegory, Sanderson focuses primarily on the walls erected through disjointed reporting. Without a coordinated effort, he says, paperwork, forms and reports are often designed differently by each department with no linkage across the plant. So to obtain a complete picture on the health of the organization, you would need to request many reports and put forth a great deal of effort. Thus, it is difficult for a plant to coordinate everyone’s expertise into a problem or accomplish unified reporting, causing action to be reactive rather than proactive.
To break down these walls and remedy the segregation of effort, Sanderson advocates the incorporation of electronic real-time reporting rather than loosely bound paperwork. Managing a company with outdated information and paper-based procedures, forms, logs and more is close to impossible in this high-speed and zero tolerance era, he says, explaining that managers with outdated and insufficient information end up making decisions based on a perception of the issues rather than on fact.
While such a system would need to be customized to the operations of each individual plant, there are some basic requirements which plants should seek in any such system, including:
- tracking of costs through each process.
- cross-platform access for customers and suppliers.
- a built-in communication module to simplify communication.
- automated functions such as planning and training scheduling, available wherever possible throughout the management system.
- on-line availability accessible by any computer regardless of its operating system or hardware.
- electronically controlled documentation and revision capabilities, including instant access to real-time and historical information.
- cross-function linkage so that standard information need only be entered once (such as a company’s name on each record).
- alignment with customer relationship management as well as purchasing, purchase ordering and vendor control.
- instant reporting in both graphical and spreadsheet formats for viewing and downloading.
- capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner and internal process information.
Such systems not only enable a plant to break down walls between departments, but enable an owner or executive manager to log into the system from virtually anywhere he or she can be online, obtain information and reports, and establish the health of the company. In addition, departmental and plant decisions can be made with the latest information based on fact and not from creative reports generated weeks too late.