Articulo

High standards

Consider the following questions:
* Does your business have incentive standards?
* Do you pay people based on some form of engineered standards?
* Does anybody have good standards?
* Is anyone happy with the rates?
* Are you just trying to avoid battles with workers or the union?
* Are loose rates costing you money, competitive advantage, or sales?
Face it, if you knewthat you were going to own the company tomorrow, you'd be doing a lot of things differently today. A disheartening thought. Why don't we operate like it's our business?
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. You may not attack the entire facility tomorrow to bring the rates in line, but you plan. You organize. You select the department or operations that are hurting you the most and goafter those first, one area at a time. After all, the place didn't get in its current condition overnight.
If one department or operation has an unusually high efficiency (that is, earnings), everyone suffers. It isn't fair to employees in other departments performing other operations. It isn't fair to the people being overpaid and therefore establishing an inflated standard of living. It isn't fairto the owners of the corporation, who want to pay correctly for the work being done. And finally, it isn't fair to the industrial engineer who will take the responsibility for incorrect standards.
This is about the direct costs of the product and, therefore, the cost of sales analysis. This is the stuff that keeps you in business. All the rates will not get back in line quickly because it is atime-consuming and tedious job. But the focus is on trying to improve the organization.
Labor pains
The problems are often compounded when workers are organized into a union that does not want to cooperate. This is a confrontational, anti-productive environment. What have been traditionally considered two sides are actually three sides. Instead of the company and the union, there are the company,the union, and the workers.
The union is not always concerned with the people, but with self-perpetuation. Many union reps are interested in looking for some detail to distort in order to make the company appear to be the "bad guy." Nevertheless, many companies have done many things that justified a union.
It's likely that midway through your last contract you had a few grievances. Perhaps,during the six months before negotiations you had more than 50 grievances. The few days immediately preceding the contract may have been even worse. The point is the union was looking for things to make it seem necessary to the people. How many of those grievances received in the six months prior to contract negotiations had valid contractual violation items? Now you're down to just a few.Occasionally, a union will try to prevent progress such as teams or employee involvement. The argument they impress upon their membership reads something like this: "The company wants your ideas so it can get improvements built into the rate and that will prevent you from making high percentages."
Sound familiar? The simple matter is that improvements, regardless of who makes them, should be captured in astandard after the change has been tested and proven. This becomes the prescribed method of operations. It is the way we will be doing business. The workers earn the higher percentage by controlling their pace of operations. The speed at which a person works will determine the percentage variation.
This process can be taken a step further: If you have a work cell, department, or area of theplant operating at more than 200 percent consistently, you have some problems with your incentive standards. Assuming no mathematical error exists in the rate build, you are looking at a drastic method change. This method change is not in your rate build-up calculations. Depending on past practices of your organization (which is not always a bullet-proof defense) or your contract, changes can be...