Recently I held an interview with a prospective client who is the Senior VP of Operations for an $8B corporation.
An associate and I were trying to convince him that even though we were small, we could give them the service to help them meet their goals quicker than doing it with their current tools. After sharing our success with him, he very adamantly stated that the results were in manufacturing and what did that have to do with their business?
He was quick to tell us how busy he was that they were engaged in the annual capital plan meeting and was not in a very good mood. Since Cost of Poor quality was only good for manufacturing, how could that metric be useful to them?
What are your goals for next year? To double the stock price, he answered.
How do the employees impact the stock price?
How does this capital plan meeting impact the stock price?
How do you measure the success of the meeting?
How do you accomplish the goals of the meeting without rework, waste and downtime?
What are the critical four to six measures that all capital spending should be measured against? Were you using a Priortization matrix (also known as a Cause and Effect Matrix or Decision Matrix) to decide which projects to fund?
Did everyone in the meeting understand what these critical few were?
After we had prioritized the list of capital appropriations, did we know how to use a FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) to see how likely we were to accomplish the goals of the appropriations?
No, the goal is not to spend all the money on time and account for all of it!
If we were not going to meet the financials promised by the job, did we have an alternate plan to make the numbers with other capital opportunities? Was someone accountable for the results? Was it baked into the operations plan?
After hearing the questions, the VP could only respond. The Prioritization matrix and FMEA do not apply to a non manufactureing environment.
