Overview

As I've repeatedly stated, the process of waste-free manufacturing is never-ending. Thus, there is a danger that the operation will begin to relax once a factory starts to benefit from the initial wins resulting from its deployment. Nothing could be more damaging. In fact, to slip back will often prove to be more harmful than never beginning the process. This is why you must know what to be constantly doing to stay the course once your factory starts to put the WFM drivers in place and begins to show some notable improvements.

To begin with, initial wins are exactly the moment for the management team to begin to express some "deliberate impatience" (as writer and lecturer Tom Peters so aptly puts it) in moving the factory along at an even more rapid pace. In fact, at every turn in the process the management team should make efforts to influence both the speed and continuance of change. An operation that allows itself to become complacent at any point in the process will find that things tend to swiftly revert back to that old system of production and the habits everyone was comfortable with at the start of the process.

Staying the course is much more difficult than making initial change of any kind. Change in manufacturing is to a large degree expected by the work force. But usually it is the type that doesn't substantially influence the way things have always been done. New machines and...