John F. DiTore

Management Style and Techniques

Spirit committee

Member of Spirit Committee:

Linear Corporation (formed committee, support financially, and participate in planning events).

Ralston Purina member.

Unilever Foods NA member.

Team building/morale boosting events planned each year.

Members are cross-functional and rotated throughout the year.

All-Hands Mtg each morning

Kickoff meeting each day

Relevant business topics

Personal: anniversaries, birthdays, family news

Culture change meetings

Mission

Why are we working?

How does our work contribute to the big picture?

Consistency

Establish set of organizational systems

Create a strong culture within the greater group

Involvement

Ownership

Sense of responsibility

More informal and less bureaucratic

Adaptability

Right attitudes towards competiveness and survival

Create right behaviors and processes

Focused Improvement

Identify business process in need of improvement

Collaborative involvement of hourly associates

Trained on go-to-meeting techniques

Flow charting

Brainstorming

Revised process flow analysis

New flowchart

Five Why analysis; Starbursting

Measurable/quantifiable goals to motivate the workforce

Attainable

Relevant

Time-bound

In writing

SWOT Analysis

Strengths and Weaknesses

Opportunities and Threats

Developed “Story Boards”

Fishbone Diagram (Ishikawa) for cause and effect analysis

T-Chart (Ben Franklin) analysis

Strengths:

What advantages does your company have?

What do you do better than anyone else?

What unique or lowest-cost resources do you have access to?

What do people in your market see as your strengths?

What factors mean that you "get the sale"?

Weaknesses:

What could you improve?

What should you avoid?

What are people in your market likely to see as weaknesses?

What factors lose you sales?

Opportunities:

Where are the good opportunities facing you?

What are the interesting trends you are aware of?

Useful opportunities can come from such things as:

Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale.

Changes in government policy related to your field.

Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes.

Local events.

Threats:

What obstacles do you face?

What is your competition doing that you should be worried about?

Are the required specifications for your job, products or services changing?

Is changing technology threatening your position?

Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?

Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your business?

Visual metrics

Posting daily metrics by team and individual by using codes instead of employee names

Challenges to improve performance

EQ vs. IQ

Emphasize the hiring of employees with more EQ tendencies than a high IQ due to team spirit.

People with high emotional intelligence (EQ) are usually successful in most things they do. Because they're the ones that others want on their team. When people with high EQ send an email, it gets answered. When they need help, they get it. Because they make others feel good, they go through life much more easily than people who are easily angered or upset.

“Reversal” techniques to elicit positive behavior

'How would I reduce customer satisfaction?'. After considering this question you might give the following answers:

Not answering the phone when customers call

Not returning phone calls

Have people with no product knowledge answering the phone

Use rude staff

Give the wrong advice

Pareto Analysis

80/20

Finding the changes that will have the biggest benefit

Low hanging fruit

Tackle a project by focusing on the low hanging fruit first.

Small successes should be celebrated.

Juran Principles:

Juran focuses on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of business operations through the elimination of variation, waste, and non-value added activities. Today's competitive advantage and always changing global environment leaves no room for inaccuracies or inefficiencies. Juran's unparalleled experience and expertise in on-site training and consulting allows us to implement customized improvement initiatives specific to the processes involved in your industry. Juran will empower your organization to achieve, and often exceed its business objectives.

Lean Six Sigma:

Juran’s Approach to Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is a result of two powerful methodologies (Lean and Six Sigma) that have a complementary toolkit. Combining the two techniques with effective team skills has provided vast improvements. Juran uses two short definitions to explain the methods of Lean and Six Sigma.

Lean is the elimination of waste, as seen from the customer and business perspective. Waste refers to the non value-added tasks that a customer or employer would not pay for. Deployment of Lean (Value Stream Management) is highly successful by using proven tools, properly applying technology, getting things done systematically and quickly, and creating a high performance work environment.

Six Sigma is a measure of performance that strives for near perfection in all processes. Six Sigma is a systematic approach and information-driven methodology for eliminating process deficiencies and variation that increase costs and reduce revenues.

The fundamental objective of Juran’s Lean Six Sigma Services is to develop a methodology and strategy that can enable your organization to focus on process improvement and variation reduction through the application of Lean and Six Sigma. This can be accomplished through the use of two of the Lean Six Sigma methodologies: DMAIC and DMADV.

The Lean Six Sigma DMAIC process (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) is an improvement system for (existing) processes falling below specification and provides methods for obtaining incremental improvement.

The Lean Six Sigma DMADV process (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify) is an improvement system used to develop new processes or products at Six Sigma quality levels.

Lean Six Sigma in the organization can be utilized to solve some of the following problems:

Dissatisfied customers

Declining revenue

Difficulty expanding contracts

Excessive number of defects

Excessive number of delays

Excessively long cycle times

Excessive costs: rework, scrap, late deliveries, replacement of returned goods, loss of customers, loss of goodwill, etc.

Excess inventory

Multiple storage and movement of materials

High conversion costs

Under utilization of capacity

Slow product development projects

Multiple or inconsistent problem-solving approaches

Employee dissatisfaction and low morale

Lean Six Sigma unites organizations to:

Achieve a common language and tool set

Ensure system-wide understanding so that all are provided with, and can successfully utilize the language, methods, and tools in alignment with corporate strategy

Increase flexibility

Achieve more efficient asset and resource utilization

Increase cash flow via reduced inventory

Improve ability to meet customer requirements

Improve quality and reliability

Self-directed work teams

Team Building:

The benefits of a team approach are many. Consider the role you play in your organization. You are one link in the process of delivering a quality good or service. The colleagues you interact with in the role of supplier, processor, and customer represent other links. On a team, each of you brings different experience, skills, know-how, and perspectives to the issues you deal with every day.

Such diversity is important to members. A single person trying to remove a problem or deficiency, no matter how skilled, has rarely mastered the intricacies of an entire work process. The most significant gains in quality are usually achieved by teams—groups of individuals pooling their talents as well as the expertise they have developed by working at different stages of a shared process.

Team Health:

Few improvement efforts can succeed without a core of well-trained team leaders who can ensure that project teams attain meaningful and lasting business results – efficiently and effectively.

Communications and team interactions skills are critical to fostering effective focused teamwork. Juran can assist you in ensuring that the health of your overall team is strong and the team has clear objectives, agreed upon goals, trust, and the ability to accept all ideas.

Facilitation Skills:

Facilitating and Leading Improvement Teams offers participants a practical framework for guiding their team's problem solving effort from start to finish achieving breakthrough improvements. Juran ensures that participants are actively involved in the learning process. They will gain hands-on experience essential for managing the challenges of leading, facilitating, and training a breakthrough improvement team.

This training is recommended for individuals who have been selected to facilitate an organization-wide effort or lead a breakthrough improvement project team.

Self-Managed Team - A group of people working together in their own ways toward a common goal which is defined outside the team - (Example - James River Corporation’s Kendallville Plant ALPHA team. They manufacture cardboard boxes as defined by executive leadership. Team does their own work scheduling, training, rewards and recognition, etc.)

Self-Directed Team - A group of people working together in their own ways toward a common goal which the team defines - (as above, but team also handles compensation, discipline, and acts as a profit center by defining its own future)

More

Less

Enthusiasm

Individual opinion about what’s important

Learning from peers

Reliance on individual abilities

Comfort knowing help is there

Panic when workload peaks

Camaraderie

Backbiting

Shared responsibility

Protecting information

Focus on the organization

What’s in it for me?

Responsibility for the team

Stress on the "supervisor"

Simple, visible measurement

Feeling unaccomplished

TPM:

TPM is a discipline comprised of most of the key ingredients of the Toyota Production System, now known as Lean Manufacturing, such as:

Total participation

Employee empowerment

Leadership environment

Continuous improvement

Development of ownership feeling

Improved attitude and morale

Increased reliability

Once a good TPM program takes off, the benefits start flowing to the whole organization. That is when many people start coming aboard. The participants feel encouraged and become familiar with communicating their ideas, confident in the new listening attitude of the whole team.

In order to create the right environment, we have to comply with the most elemental requirements:

Total commitment from the top management.

Appropriate diffusion of the plan and its results.

Authentic empowerment and mutual respect at all levels.

John DiTore

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