We have all been learning an important lesson from these projects: The average employee is capable of delivering far more than the terms empowerment and participative management have suggested in the past.
People can, in fact, learn to be self-managing, self-adjusting, whatever-it-takes employees. An emerging trend from these breakthrough improvement activities is known as craft-based manufacturing.
Craft-based manufacturing is evolving from the traditional work cell concepts of the last decade. Work cells have focused on a narrower physical process and are usually designed around a segment of the factory floor. Work cells are also static by design because they have been developed for a specific set of circumstances and are usually staffed only by hourly employees.
The major disadvantage of this work cell approach is inflexibility to major shifts in mix, volume and variety. In addition, work cell members are usually isolated from critical business decisions such as design, marketing and sourcing. As one manager once stated, "Our rate of new product introductions, shorter life cycles and massive offerings have turned our work cells into cellulite."
Craft-based manufacturing is a cluster of cross-functional, multi-level employees that are encouraged to perform as an independent, de facto small business. Unlike the work cell concept, the craft-based philosophy promotes a cross-business scope and can be implemented in a wider variety of organizations such as low volume, military, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, service or process industries.
Craft-based manufacturing is something of an oxymoron because the teams possess the full scope of skill sets, core competencies and functional responsibilities required to operate as a stand-alone business. The integrated business team operates as end-to-end entrepreneurial process owners across the full spectrum of strategic, tactical and daily issues. Individuals identify customer/market needs, design and develop new products, determine manufacturing and outsourcing decisions, select sources of supply, and establish delivery and partnering requirements with customers. These business teams are also capable of finding, recruiting and connecting the best resources instantaneously to repeat their success.
Craft-based manufacturing isn't a panacea or a pipe dream, but it isn't a cake walk either. It's easy to see the physical relocation of people, but it is difficult to appreciate the radical structural, process and cultural changes that have been implemented to make these business teams work. A major factor for the success of this craft-based philosophy is senior management's commitment to disequilibrium, reinvention and chaos as new norms in their business. They encourage entrepreneurial thinking and starting over, rather than applying more continuous improvement and TQM bandaids to fundamentally bad processes.
Following are a few case studies:
In all of the examples above, craft-based manufacturing has required major injections of new talents and core skills in these organizations. The individuals at these manufacturers recognize that talent and knowledge, not information, is power. In a rapidly changing business environment, information becomes obsolete too quickly.
These organizations have also learned to convert talent to new knowledge through implementation activities where the results were not often clear. Finally, they are able to convert these accumulated skills to a new level of industry knowledge beyond their competition and repeat the process.
The trouble with most organizations is that they continue to operate on the basis of known or accepted norms for their industry. They benchmark themselves against other organizations in their industry with the same problems and ultimately confirm that everything is fine. While craft-based manufacturing is a radical departure from traditional functional structures, it has proven to be capable of helping organizations create new competitive opportunities and shape the emergence of future industry structures to one's own competitive advantage.