When you think “Mindset” of an operation, what do you think of? Basically, what drives the decisions of the leaders and creates the environment that they work in every day?

Every day, a business should start with the mindset that the processes that produce the product or service MUST be stable prior to anything else taking place. That means ANYTHING.

When the process is not stable:

• If there are meetings, those are put on hold/cancelled
• If there are visitors, those are delayed
• If there is a celebration, that is put on hold

Nothing gets in front of the health of the process and the process owner in terms of the priorities of the company. Plant managers, operations leaders, and everyone else in the organization understands that the health of the process and the process owners is the MOST IMPORTANT thing in the company.

Line Centric starts with clear Standardized Processes for each process, for which the Process Owner is front and center. Without standardized processes, there is no standard and therefore no way to know if you are running the process well or not. When things go wrong, there is also no reference to do a problem-solve (no way to know what “good” looks like), as a problem-solve requires a “should” AND an “actual”. Without the standards, there is no “should”.

All support teams should have their priorities adjusted, as well, in order to ensure the processes are supported first. Engineering teams, for example, should be linked to the floor and support adjusted to ensure long term success. Those engineers should be challenged to drive improvement directly tied to the team, meaning their goals are aligned via Cascaded Goals created in a strategy deployment process with involvement from every discipline in the company.

In order to maintain the line centric mindset and ensure that issues are escalated quickly to the right levels and addressed quickly, a system needs to be in place to facilitate this process. That system is called the Daily Accountability Process (DAP). DAP is a process that ensures that each level of the organization is tied together with each other and ensures that support is given to the right processes in the right amount of time.

As part of DAP, each Process Owner creates and owns their own targets for a specific time interval of the day, typically every hour, that is in accordance with the priorities and goals of the business. By ensuring the Process Owner owns this and not the leaders, it creates a sense of ownership within those running the processes and reduces the need for leaders to spend much of their time “checking up” on the Process Owners. Instead, they can focus on improving the product or process.

A critical part of creating a line-centric mindset is in the commitment of the executive leadership team to this philosophy, as well. If the executive team does not fully support the facility leadership teams in enabling them to be autonomous and cancel meetings, as needed, to support the facility, then the concept will not work. The executive team needs to model the line-centric mindset by showing that no matter what, the needs of the production floor is the top priority for the company.

CwB leads its clients through a proven process that ensures the entire organization becomes aligned to the most important thing: is the process stable and if not, what do I need to do to help? Once this mindset is in place, truly exceptional results can be achieved and sustained