No Feasible Solution

A manufacturing plant has to do three things.

Make the product to plan. Make it to quality. Send everybody home whole.

That is it. Three. A new hire can hold all three in his head by the end of his first shift, and every one of them is visible from where he stands. He can see whether the line is running. He can see whether the part is right. He can see whether the guy next to him still has all his fingers.

Add cost to budget at the plant manager’s desk and you have four. Add the growth number the business is actually being run for — the one the board asks about — and you have five.

Five. That is the entire measurement architecture of a manufacturing enterprise. It fits on a card.

So how does every plant I have ever worked in end up with twenty?

The Board Was Green

I have stood in front of a board with twenty-two metrics on it, every one of them green, and known that at least six were dressed.

Not lies I told. Lies the system required. Each number carried a target set by someone who had never run the line it measured. Each target was to be hit at one hundred percent. Twenty-two of them. Simultaneously. Anyone who has run a plant knows the arithmetic: hitting all twenty-two is not possible, so what goes on the board is not performance. It is a negotiation between what happened and what can be defended.

I want to be precise about my position in that room. I was not the victim of that board. I built boards like it. I presented them. I coached supervisors on which number to lead with and which to bury in the appendix, and I called it managing upward — which is the phrase we use when we do not want to say the other thing.

The floor knew. They always know. They watch the board go up and can tell you within thirty seconds which numbers are real and which are dressed, because they are the ones who dressed them — which line ran overtime to make plan, which quality escape got recategorized as a customer specification issue.

And they draw the only available conclusion. That the measurement is theater. That management knows it is theater. That the job is to not disturb it.

That is the day formation dies. Not when the training budget gets cut. When the floor learns that the numbers are a performance, and that nobody upstairs wants to know.

Three Metrics, Colliding

Let me show you the three colliding, before I show you twenty.

Lansing Delta Township. We installed a robot at the spare tire load station — a productivity project that took out one person a shift, three across the three shifts. The implementation was a disaster. Controls faulted nightly. And because there were no longer human eyes on cars entering the cell, any part even marginally out of position would stop the robot. That happened almost daily. The line would go down in chassis, and chassis would charge the downtime to my trim shop.

There was a second loss nobody had costed. The spare tire load station was where the car came down off the elevated conveyor — the one spot on the line where a team leader could reach a defect at working height and fix it before the car went out the door. The robot took that spot. It did not appear anywhere in the business case, because the business case counted three heads and nothing else.

So one night a defect comes down from trim needing repair. Kirk Branson, one of my best team leaders and one of the few I had loose that night, walks half a mile down the line, times the car, and gets himself into the enclosure to make the fix without stopping anything.

He knew about the light curtain. He had worked around light curtains for years, and he took careful, intelligent contortions to get in and out without breaking the beam.

What he did not know was that this cell had two of them, in two planes. Nobody in trim had been trained on the safety system around that robot. It was his first time inside it. He had reasoned carefully about a system we had never taught him, and reasoned correctly about the half he knew.

He tripped the other one. Chassis went down about thirty minutes on a line building fifty-five cars an hour. Do that arithmetic.

And on paper, what I now had was a gross safety violation by one of my best people.

Look at what the metric system saw. Quality said fix the defect before it leaves. Throughput said do not stop the line. Safety said do not enter the cell. All three were mandatory. All three were correct. And the one man on the floor with the judgment to hold all three at once had been handed a cell nobody taught him, in a layout that had quietly removed the only place those three used to be reconcilable.

He did not fail the three metrics. We had made them unsatisfiable, and then measured him against them anyway.

He was never in danger. The system worked exactly as designed. It detected a man where a man should not be, and it stopped.

But the downtime was charged to my shop, and so we called a discipline meeting.

I want to be exact about what we were doing, because at the time we told ourselves it was about safety. It was not. We were angry about the downtime, and we reached for the safety file to justify it — because we had terminated skilled trades and maintenance supervisors before for lockout-tagout failures, those cases were sitting right there, and they let us treat a training gap we had created as a violation Kirk had committed.

He heard a discipline meeting was coming and he was shocked. Then he was furious. He had walked half a mile on his own time to save a car, and we were building a file on him.

His supervisor disciplined him in front of the shop committeeman. The committeeman grieved it on the spot, in full.

He was right to. That is the sentence I have taken thirty years to be able to write plainly. The grievance was the only part of that entire process that was working