Is It Time to Value Intelligence in Business?
Let others know you are looking for ways to improve.
As business seeks to lower costs, the tendency is to hire cheaper labor. Business is looking for people who will do what they are told to do – no more and no less.
I attended a meeting on Toyota management style. The speaker claimed that Toyota maintains a higher workforce than its competitors because it wants human intelligence at as many points as possible. Toyota encourages and rewards workers who come up with new ideas for performing their jobs.
He gave paint sprayers as one example. The paint sprayers have a small container connected to them. It contains just enough paint for one car. If they want to change colors, they just change the container. Contrast that with an American manufacturer which paints many cars the same color from a large container of paint. What difference does it make? By having paint at the sprayer, paint is not traveling through hoses and being retained in a barrel. Waste is reduced.
Toyota is responding to market demands. As cars are sold, they are replaced. As cars are ordered, they are produced. The process keeps inventory low by producing what buyers want. Want a different color? No problem. Just change the container.
McCall pattern was doing something similar when I was working for IBM in the late 1970s. For those who know nothing about making your own clothes, a pattern is a thin paper with lines on it that is placed over cloth and assists in cutting the cloth to the correct size to make a dress, shirt, slacks, etc. Data on sales of the patterns were accumulated at five different locations around the country and the information was sent to the manufacturing plant in Manhattan, KS. Inventory was kept low by making patterns on demand. People watched the machines make the patterns. Most of the process was automated.
What do we lose with automation? We can certainly have robots remove the repetitive tasks that would drive many people crazy. Are we losing efficiency? According to the speaker, it was someone painting cars at Toyota that realized that using less paint would result in less waste and more efficiency. We lose that intelligence when we automate.
Reward employees for thinking of ways to improve your business. Ask customers what could be done to improve your business. It is difficult for those of us who have built our own businesses to think that someone else might help us be better. Such might be the case. We can improve by valuing intelligence.