Understanding, Measuring, and Improving Daily Management

Understanding, Measuring, and Improving Daily Management explains the critical parts of a continuous improvement strategy to achieve Operational Excellence and where reactive improvement through effective daily management fits in. In addition, it shows the consequences to your Operational Excellence journey if daily management is not performed well.

Reactive improvement develops the capability and discipline within the organization to be able to rapidly recover from an event or incident that stops you from achieving your expected or target performance for the day, shift, or hour and most importantly -- your ability to capture the learning and initiate corrective actions so that the event or incident will not re-occur anywhere across the organization. As such, reactive improvement focuses on improving daily management through your daily review meetings, your information centers supporting the daily review meetings, and your frontline problem-solving root cause analysis capability at all levels.

The book introduces the seven elements of reactive improvement that must work in concert for effective daily management and allows the reader to rate their site or department to determine their starting point compared to best practices:

1. Supportive organization structure to support development of your people so they have ownership and accountability for the performance of their area of responsibility;

2. Effective frontline leaders to ensure everyone else in the leadership structure are not working down a level;

3. Appropriate measures with expected targets that are linked to the site’s Key Success Factors for Operations to ensure goal alignment, and are relevant to the area being focused on;

4. Structured daily review meetings to identify opportunities (problems/incidents) and monitor progress of their solution so they don’t happen again;

5. Visual information centers that visually display daily and trending performance along with monitoring of actions to address problems/issues raised;

6. Frontline problem-solving root cause analysis capability across the site; and

7. Rapid sharing of learning capability across shifts, departments, and the organization.

The author outlines in detail why each of the seven elements are important to achieving Operational Excellence, and most importantly, how to implement each element supported with many templates and tools.

Ross commenced his working career in 1970 at the Port Kembla Steelworks (12 yrs); followed by Cable Makers Australia (5 yrs) and David Brown Gear Industries (3 yrs). Over these 20 years he gained hands-on manufacturing and operational experience covering maintenance (14 years), production, operations and executive roles before moving into management consulting.

In 1985, Ross developed his passion for Lean Production following his involvement in the Value Added Management (JIT) initiative by the NSW Government. Ross quickly and effectively applied the new Lean principles and practices firstly at the CMA Foam Group Lullaby Bedding Factory while Factory Manager, then CMA’s Cable Accessories Factory as Site Manager before moving to David Brown Gear Industries as Manufacturing Manger to establish and oversee the relocation of the company from Sydney to Wollongong to a new facility set up on Lean principles and practices.

In 1989 after the new facility was well established and recognised for its leading edge improvements based on Lean, Ross was invited to join the new JIT / Lean practice being established by the Manufacturing and Operations Group of Coopers & Lybrand's International Management Consulting Practice based in Sydney.

Over the next 5 years Ross had the opportunity to work on major assignments with some of the firm’s leading Lean practitioners from USA, Canada and the UK. It was also during this time that he first came across TPM (a critical missing link in the Lean tool kit) in 1990 when he led one of the first implementations of TPM in Australasia under the guidance of John Campbell who was Partner-in-Charge of Coopers & Lybrand’s Global Centre for Maintenance Excellence based in Canada and author of the internationally recognised maintenance book – Uptime.

In August 1994, Ross established his own consulting practice specialising in TPM. He organised and chaired Australasia’s first TPM conference in 1995 and, at the request of the delegates at the conference, Ross with several colleagues founded The Centre for TPM (Australasia) in January 1996 to provide a membership-based organisation to support Australasian industry and academia.

After extensive research including a trip to Paris in 1997 to attend Europe’s first World-Class Manufacturing & JIPM-TPM Conference and associated workshops with leading TPM practitioners from throughout the world, The Centre for TPM (Australasia) launched its TPM3 methodology in January 1998, which is an enhanced and expanded Australasian version of the Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance (JIPM) 3rd Generation TPM embracing the Toyota Production System and spanning the entire Supply Chain.

Since then CTPM has been involved with a wide range of leading manufacturing, mining, processing, utilities and service companies. For example from Sept 1998 to June 2003 CTPM assisted Telstra roll-out their TPM initiative to over 200 teams servicing their Customer Access Copper Network in 16 Regions throughout Australia resulting in over $110m in savings.

Ross has been actively involved with Lean Production since 1985, TPM since 1990 and Australasian TPM & Lean (TPM3) since 1998 and has delivered publicly over 200 workshops and papers on the subjects both within Australia and overseas.

CTPM, under the direction of Ross with his team of experienced CI Specialists, is presently assisting over 30 sites located in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Indonesia and China on their TPM & Lean / CI journeys to Operational Excellence and World Class Performance.