Company culture can often have a silo mentality that can manifest itself in varying degrees of a “them and us” attitude. These silos often occur, not only within the company, but with a company’s suppliers and customers. These silos can lead to a failure to recognise the importance of value-stream execution, by not allowing for the realization that the silos have more in common, and need each other more, so they can achieve more across the whole value stream, than can be achieved within the various functional silos.
Companies who have embraced the lean six sigma improvement methodology and have conducted many successful improvement projects can still be too slow to get projects going in the areas of Innovation and Supply Chain. Yet these areas drive the significant margin opportunities. Therefore, the challenge is to convince key stakeholders to address a full-scale value stream deployment rather than settle for incremental benefits. How can management address this challenge?
Management’s dilemma is compounded by too many consultants claiming Lean Six Sigma (LSS) or operational excellence (OPEX) expertise and translating LSS/OPEX into a commodity. This is exactly what happened to LSS’s predecessor improvement approaches such as TQM. Management inherently wants to move fast, or at least get results fast. A full LSS/OPEX program deployment involves addressing the overall company strategic planning and end-to-end value stream execution processes in their respective competitor marketplace. However, several management executives believe erroneously that LSS is too slow and evades “their space”. Furthermore, the end-to-end approach is a problem for management since it implies either that they are not doing a good job, or that tackling issues they see in their area of responsibility may be beyond their span of control. Therefore, it is difficult to the gain cross-leadership sustained buy-in for perpetual culture change in some of the most sensitive areas of the business, namely Innovation and Supply Chain improvement. There are few leaders who as yet believe that LSS could impact areas that could directly impact brand image.
Leadership seeks stability within their business landscape. They believe that they understand their end-to-end value stream and can control their destiny of success. Therefore, Leaders have the belief that they have the power to influence to create stability of the internal/external business landscape on their terms. To add to this challenge, is that the majority of companies remain in stage 1-2 within the 5-stage maturity capability models. This holds back the organization’s capability to be able to plan for the marketplace perturbations. As consultants, the challenge is to overcome the leaders’ natural egos and protectionism to gain admittance into Strategy, Innovation, Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) and End-to-End Processes. Management often wants to see proof-of-concept resulting in a slow moving program. If consultants reject offering the reduced scope deployment that a prospective client is willing to commit to, the client may go with a competitor. The competitor may then provide a simple program that does not address their value stream cultural transformation gaps. In summary, there are many contradictory business challenges, as well as, competitor and local distractions that prohibit a full-scale deployment. Therein lies the challenge for progressive leadership groups and their prospective consulting partners for the next 5-15 years.
(This article originally appeared on http://iqbsconsulting.com/ and has been republished on this site with permission.)