1 pararagph each response to 2 Colleagues

Read through your colleagues’ posts and respond to two or more of your colleagues in the following way:

· Describe a possible strategy for identifying or addressing the bottlenecks at the company and explain why you think this strategy could work.

1st Colleague to respond to:

Hello class,

 

For this week’s discussion, I have chosen to focus on my immediate past place of employment which was a small manufacturing company that specialized in the provision of print and print-related products and services. The company has been in operations for just over 50 years and employed just over 200 members of staff, more than 80% of which were directly employed in the plant to provide the bulk of manual labour in the finishing department. Due to the lack of mechanization and automation, the company’s operations were heavily dependent on human physical labour to complete customer orders. I chose this company for this week’s discussion because being employed in my capacity as Operations Manager, I saw firsthand the performance challenges with which the company contended and the many factors which contributed to the challenges. I believe there are valuable lessons to be taken from the experiences with that organization.

 

A constraint is a condition or variable whose presence limits or restricts an organization for optimizing operations. Dalton (2009) after identifying the different categories of constraints as being policy, physical, and market reinforces the point that regardless of the constraint type, effective resolution can only be achieved after the correct identification of the constraint. I have chosen to look at what I believe were two significant constraints which significantly impacted the company’s performance namely: recruiting and HR management and the adoption of technology and automation.

 

Constraint #1 – Recruiting & HR management

The company’s operational success in the areas of meeting turnaround times, maintaining quality standards, and achieving productivity targets was heavily dependent on manual labour from the staff, particularly in the finishing department. It, therefore, required persons who were of a certain standard who could translate company requirements into reality. However, the company had significant anomalies in its hiring process. For starters, there were no documented standards which outlines a step by step guide from advertising a vacancy to onboarding a successful candidate. Job requirements were not used as the basis of employment nor were there any minimum requirements for prospects to achieve. Rather, persons were arbitrarily selected for employment and placed on the plant floor with the hopes that one day they would master their assigned task.

This constraint manifested itself initially in production where it was very difficult to achieve any level of consistency in quality, turnaround time, or productivity. It was a hit or miss situation with finding staff who met the bill and those who did not would just be left within the system in a never-ending cycle of failing to meet standards.

King (2011) proposes that many organizations fail to address constraints and their associated bottlenecks because they fail to identify where in the organization they exist. Usually, organizations require independent observers who are not entrenched in the processes to objectively identify constraints and bottlenecks. The recruiting constraint was difficult for the organization to firstly identify and then resolve because their focus was fixed on keeping down expenses associated with staff. Consequently, rather than searching for persons who were at a particular level, they chose from the least qualified who would generate the lowest expenses. They failed to realize that these persons were the least trainable and were less likely to achieve operational goals and targets resulting in the continuation of the significant quality issues and production challenges that were present. This constraint requires a two-sided approach for arriving at a resolution. On one hand, the hiring process must be modified to include a defined process for recruiting staff. Job requirements must be used as the basis of searching and employment and all potential employees must possess some minimum standards. The use of aptitude tests and other screening tools would go a far way in minimizing the likelihood of hiring a misfit. Finally, budgetary allocations must be made to hire competent people and hold them accountable rather than hiring the least qualified and living with low output levels.

On the other hand, significant efforts must be placed into identifying gaps that exist with existing employees with a plan of improving performance through training and exposure. Those who fail to respond to this intervention will be candidates for job rotation, reassignments, or in extreme cases, separate based on performance (Dalton, 2009).

 

Constraint #2 – Adoption of Technology & Automation

As a 50-year-old company that has had most of its staff and leaders operating prior to the current technology boom, there is an embedded culture of working manually. Most processes are manual, record-keeping is manual, reporting is manual and even the whole production process is manual and void of automation. Attempts in the past to introduce technology and automation failed because of resistance from staff who believed that acceptance would signal their replacement. Additionally, the management team was convinced that they were able to operate efficiently doing what they have mastered over the past 50 years.

This constraint has adversely affected the company who, on account of the resistance, failed to make any investments in upgrades, modernization, or retooling. Efficiencies and advancements in business operations have not been realized and consequently, competition has rapidly been eroding company market shares. In failing to embrace technology in any meaningful way, there has been no reduction in operating costs, no improvements in throughput or productivity, no development of any new capabilities, new products nor new services. In short, the company has rapidly been traversing a path of extinction.

To resolve this significant constraint, there is an urgent need for changes in approach and mindsets. One option could be the augmenting of the leadership core with individuals experienced in the use of technology to drive business performance. This will serve as a catalyst for change. Additionally, small incremental projects can be simultaneously embarked on by identifying low hanging opportunities and capitalizing on them. Opportunities such as the digitization of manual paper-based records, the introduction of small, automated equipment such as counters, and the education of staff on the benefits of technology in business operations. Throughout the entire process, a consistent message that the technology is not intended to cause job losses, which typically is the source of resistance but rather to improve efficiency, productivity, and reduce costs.

 

Reference

Dalton, M. A. (2009). What's Constraining Your Innovation? Research-Technology Management, 52(5), 52-64.

King, P. L. (2011). The bottleneck conundrum: Breaking up logjams can be key for process plant production. Industrial Engineer: IE, 43(1), 41–46.

2nd Colleague to respond to:

My organization is a software company where one division is a reseller for a major corporation of design software, document management, and PLM tools, and the other division sells developer-direct proprietary document management and business system integration platforms.  While Covid-19 has severely impacted our organization, we are staying in business and working long hours to bring in business from a primarily industry-based client base.  The majority of our clients are engineers in many different industries.  While we had constraints before Covid-19, they are infinitely more pronounced now. 

Our company is small and private, and to this point, our Senior Leadership has refused to consider venture capital money or investors for our product development division, our product development team is small compared to the giants that we compete with in that same division, and the rules and regulations that the corporation we resell for have become extremely restrictive in our reseller division.  These are just a few of the many constraints that we have, and I would argue the largest for our company.  The lack of money severely impacts our ability to hire outside contractors or more developers and QA people, which means that we are always running to keep up.  I don’t know that this constraint is difficult to identify, and we do manage to stay in business, however, although me and most of my colleagues agree that this is an obvious point, our Senior Leaders turn a blind eye to this, and when it comes up in brainstorming sessions, the immediate response is, “We would have to give up product direction and company control.”  While I agree with Dalton when he writes, “most companies don’t need to invest any more than they already are in order to increase innovation-driven growth,” I do not agree with this statement in our case when we have to constantly keep up with the competition and develop innovative products.  (Dalton, M. A., 2009, p. 52)  “When a creative task is too constraining, employees’ motivation is hampered,” write Acar et al.  (Acar, O. A., et al., 2019)  This lack of resources has negatively impacted the size of our team as well.

Having a small team to make fixes to the existing products, create new products that keep up with the latest CAD releases we manage, create new product, and test that product, and expecting that team to come up with innovative ideas is a huge constraint and has caused massive stress in all levels of our company.  This constraint is also not difficult to identify, and yet Senior Leadership consistently invests in the sales team when our business has money to spend, rather than in developers.  We are creating our own viewer now, and there are other ideas that have been offered, like data-driven reporting, but without the money to make agreements with the creators of these products, the innovation and by default, our competitiveness in an industry that is ruled by huge corporations, is becoming increasingly more difficult.  The other division used to make up for the lack of income on our development team, and the restrictions and rules that the corporation we resell for has put on all resellers, has forced most resellers to either merge together or go out of business.  Our services are exemplary, and I believe that is the reason that division still makes money.  It is also the reason why our Senior Leaders, I believe, do not make a more definitive change.

If our company does not make different decisions about the money constraints, the team size constraint, and the reseller rule constraint, we could be out of business in the next five years.  We have got Fortune 500 companies that swear by our product and by our service, and we have been in business for over 30 years.  If this happens, it will be sad for all of us, and we all hope that our Senior Leaders’ identify ways to overcome our constraints.  Hope, however, is not a strategy.

 

References

Acar, O. A., Turakci, M., & van Knippenberg, D. (2019). Why constraints are good for innovation.

Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-constraints-are-good-for-innovation

DALTON, M. A. (2009). What’s Constraining Your Innovation? Research Technology Management, 52(5),

52–64. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1080/08956308.2009.11657589