by Vince Fayad
Daily Management is the performance of business fundamentals in an organization required to serve customers and be profitable on a day-to-day basis. A World Class Enterprise can be built only on a strong foundation of an under-control workforce and processes. Lean and Lean improvements require the discipline of having procedures throughout the organization that all the associates follow. Lean can be successful only when the daily business fundamentals are under control - those things that you do on a daily basis to serve your customer and run the business.
There are fifteen signs or symptoms of poor Daily Management:
1. Quality problems and incidents increase when vacation or other relief workers are employed
2. Process performance (quality and output) is noticeably and quantitatively different from shift to shift
3. Planned process changes/product changes do not go smoothly
4. Different operators run the same equipment differently
5. The same work rules, methods, and conditions have existed for a long time and things are not getting better
6. Process performance deteriorates with the age of equipment
7. Problems in key performance areas (e.g., quality, delivery, productivity) have been solved numerous times only to return after a short absence
8. Different departments (and individuals within departments) have, or appear to have, different goals and objectives associated with their outputs
9. Equipment failures and outages create havoc for the organization because dealing with them is almost always reactionary
10. Processes are run to the best of the operator's ability and adjustments and corrections are made based on judgment (as opposed to data)
11. When "seasoned" employees change jobs or retire, problems spring up in the area they left
12. Process performance modification and control is not documented empirically
13. Many problems of quality, traceability, and accountability are traced to between-shift transfer or handoff
14. Expedited orders slow down (even get lost) between shifts and/or between departments
15. When someone important is due to visit, you have to take special time and effort to clean and organize things
Without the discipline of Daily Management, Lean, or any other type of improvements
are not sustainable. These improvement efforts would then just be added to the organization's wasteful activities. See figure below.