When I visit Hypertherm customers—pretty much anywhere in the world these days—the two most common goals that they share with me in the current slower economic environment are to improve the profitability of their existing
operations and to find new avenues of growth. I’d probably answer in the same way for Hypertherm, as would most business leaders today. Up until about five years ago, the priority was more commonly to manage growth and increase throughput in a fast-growth world.
So what is today’s operations leader to do when the boss wants him/her all
at once to maintain uninterrupted quality production, re-engineer current
operations for improved cost and simultaneously develop/support new operational
capabilities for growth? Most such leaders shrug and say something about
cloning themselves, probably because their detailed involvement and management
of all three areas just seems unavoidable. But, even for the most heroic and
capable such leader, something ends up giving, and one goal or the other comes
up short.
The limiting assumption in all of this is that all significant change and
improvement depends on the leader and that the primary bottleneck for such
change is leadership capacity and knowledge. At Hypertherm and at other
progressive manufacturing companies, there’s a movement afoot to demonstrate
the fallacy of that assumption and to create competitive advantage in the
application of “lean principles and standards for operational excellence”
across the workforce. The idea is that, if all members of the workforce
understand and master the fundamentals of value stream design and can “see the
flow of value to the customer and fix it before it breaks down,” then the
enterprise not only achieves high performance and constant improvement, but
also multiplies its effective operations leadership capacity. Freed up from
day-to-day operations interventions and leveraging every team member to drive
improvement, operations leaders are liberated to engage in strategy and lead in
business development for growth.
At Hypertherm, we follow and strive to deploy this philosophy not only in our own operations, but also in how we design our products and services for our manufacturing customers. Internally, all of our operations teams complete an intense 12-week program on Hypertherm’s lean principles, standards and tools, culminating in formal application projects within their work areas and continuing with ongoing re-certification. As a 100 percent associate-owned company (“associate” being our preferred alternative to “employee”) we don’t struggle to create buy-in or alignment in these efforts. Then we apply the same tools to analyze and understand our customers’ work streams and key improvement needs and opportunities, striving to come to you not only with the best cutting technology possible, but also as a trusted,
value-added advisor in the improvement and optimization of your total value
streams.
Sincerely,
Evan Smith, President
