They always arrive in threes. Sometimes young, brilliant and shirts immaculate. They interview everyone, photograph the whiteboards, nod knowingly.
Eight weeks later: a hundred and twenty slides. The analysis is correct, by the way. Everyone nods along in the management committee. Handshake. Invoice.
The report sits in the drawer. Right next to the previous one.
Meanwhile on line 2, the changeover still takes two hours.
Effort gets billed, never results. Try that with your own customers: a truckload of raw materials invoiced, delivery not guaranteed. You’d last three weeks.
The one who wins you over is not the one who shows up. The grey-templed partner signs the contract; three juniors come to learn the trade. On your site. At your rates.
A solved problem is a lost client. A “complex” problem, on the other hand — that one keeps running, billable hours,…
Nobody cheats, mind you. Everyone does their job. It’s the model.
The same problems keep coming back. Not new ones — the same ones. Last quarter’s, last year’s. They have survived three action plans and two acronyms.
The planning gets put out every morning, like a fire. We call that flexibility.
The KPIs exist. They’re even on display. Between the board in the corridor and what happens on the line lies about forty metres. Nobody has ever crossed them.
Production produces, sales sells. Preferably not the same thing.
And the rework, the material losses, the twenty-second stops? They show up nowhere. Part of the trade, apparently.
Why do the same problems keep coming back? Where exactly is money being lost — not roughly, exactly? Why do targets never make it down to the line? How do you produce more without hiring more? How do you move from firefighting to structural?
These are the questions every production owner asks. In the evening, in the car, on the way home.
A hundred and twenty slides never answered a single one. Your operators, though, hold part of the answers. They were interviewed once. For slide 47.
Good question.
A consultant paid on results? Who spends his days on the line rather than in the meeting room? Who dares to tell you after three days that there isn’t enough to gain against the cost of the project — and goes home?
They say it doesn’t exist.
The women and men of JOX move things where they need to move: on the shopfloor… And they generally don’t like being called “consultants”.
They have all lived the nonsense themselves, in their previous roles.
Continue poking fun at lived anecdotes, look for solutions together over a cup of coffee, or start by reading: the five most common loss patterns are in our white paper. Same address.
Steve Van Dessel – www.thejoxway.com – steve.vandessel@thejoxway.com
