Restructuring A Company For QRM Success

To restructure a company for QRM, there are seven key principles that deviate from the traditional cost-based manufacturing philosophy. The implementation of these principles will reduce lead-time for existing products.

1. The organization of tasks, procedures, equipment, and processes must be changed from a functional basis to a product-oriented basis. All the resources to complete a given product are collocated. These product-focused groups can be called work cells, cellular manufacturing, or simply cells. It is important that the shift to cells includes both shop floor and office operations.
2. The structure of the organization must be transformed from hierarchical (many levels), to flat, with many teams.
3. The Human Resources department should develop cross-trained personnel in many operations rather than narrowly defined tasks.
4. The management of processes must be changed from top-down control of individual processes in each department to ownership of the entire delivery process by product teams.
5. Once the first four principles are in place, the current complex centralized scheduling and control systems should be replaced with simpler, local planning and scheduling procedures.
6. There is no longer the need to process an entire batch at each operation before moving it since the operations are now closer to each other in the cells. The parts must be moved in smaller batches, resulting in less work-in-progress (WIP) in the cell.
7. With this type of organization in place, the cells must run smaller production batches while simultaneously improving quality and reducing waste

Successful Restructuring Proven At AEC

Prior to implementation of QRM, AEC's manufacturing processes had a three shift operation with three separate Supervisors. AEC formed a Power Tool Cell which operated across all three shifts. If AEC would have left the original reporting structure in tact, the cell would have had three different directives. To avoid this complication, AEC restructured, which allowed the cell to report to one Supervisor. Now all three shifts have one set of measurements revolving around lead-time reduction and process improvements.