Consulted!

[Capt Worley PE]

I worked at a small manufacturing company that was pretty darn efficient, until they bought in a consultant to show us how to do things. The consultant was all excited about getting our inventory turns up and having less stuff on hand. Sounds nice, but....

Sales had no idea what they would sell that month, let alone that week, and we prided ourselves on shipping product (a very diverse line) three days after order. Parts lead time for components was six weeks. The consultant insisted we only have one week of inventory on hand, and the boss agreed.

Needless to say, the sales projections we based parts orders on were waaaay out of whack. Orders didn't ship for weeks (which according to our 'metrics' made manufacturing look bad) because not enough parts were ordered, and some parts sat idle for weeks because the projected sales for the unit that used them never materialized.

It was a disaster. Shipping time went from three days to over three weeks. Some orders were canceled because they were delayed six weeks. Sales fell 50%.

 

[cement]

I'll bet the consultant was paid in full, and had limited liability language in the contract.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

I don't know about the contract, but he was getting paid more than I was and I ended up getting laid off...

 

[Dleg]

I think the consultant sucked, that's for sure, but I doubt that your company would have any luck in a lawsuit. Sure, your boss probably hired the guy because he felt like he didn't know enough to really optimize his own processes. But I would argue that he (or his own employees advising him) should have been able to see the possible negative impacts that would be caused by the consultant's advice.

As a government employee, I know what it's like to hand over projects to consultants with the expectation that they will be able to provide a better solution than the agency has the time, experience, or skills to do themselves. But at the same time, I also know that those consultants, while they may be very experienced and clever, do not know anything about the overall workings and plans of our agency, and can totally fudge things up if you take everything they say as gospel. I have pissed off many a consultant by sending their entire product (draft regulations, guidance, designs, whatever) back to them saying "yeah, but you don't seem to udnerstand that this would cause x and y, etc. Take that into account and do it again." (of course, I try to do this as early in the process as possible!)

 

[EdinNO]

Interesting.

That is the type of wrok I do now for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership of Louisiana. We're a partially state/partially federally sanctioned non-profit whose sole mission is to halp manufacturers so they can succeed in the US and thereby support or local and national economies. There's at least one MEP in every state- for a total of 59, I believe, nation-wise.

Anyway, that's interesting to hear. What types of analyses did he do? Was there a Value Stream Map (VSM) done? What were the items that were identifies as needing fixing?

A lot of the Lean Manufacturing concepts (which I presume he tried to implement) work well in theory in an ideal world, but there are certainly times where one needs to let go and/or customize the Lean tools to meet real-world circumstances.

Ed

 

[Capt Worley PE]

The SC MEP had come by and looked the place over and said we looked good, which we did at the time. The owner, however, decided he had to change something, I guess...

This guy did clean up a bunch of accounting things that needed to be addressed, but the way we sold/manufactured things was so different that traditional lean manufacturing couldn't work for us.

As for analysis...I don't know for sure how much he did on the manufacturing side (other than listen to sales managers). He'd worked in some other companies that were mass production outfits. We definitely were not that. The methods he used elsewhere didn't work to well in that particular situation.

 

[Slugger926]

The SC MEP had come by and looked the place over and said we looked good, which we did at the time. The owner, however, decided he had to change something, I guess...
This guy did clean up a bunch of accounting things that needed to be addressed, but the way we sold/manufactured things was so different that traditional lean manufacturing couldn't work for us.

As for analysis...I don't know for sure how much he did on the manufacturing side (other than listen to sales managers). He'd worked in some other companies that were mass production outfits. We definitely were not that. The methods he used elsewhere didn't work to well in that particular situation.

Sounds like they tried to implement the change too fast. Per my class on change, some methods may take as long as ten years to implement to not negatively impact the company.