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Torbjorn
Larsson, COO After
World War II, Japanese automotive plant managers got a radical idea from pioneers
at Toyota: install a chain or button that stops the entire assembly line. If workers
observed a defect, they were instructed to pull the chain, even though a half-mile
of assembly line might screech to a halt. When the chain was pulled, it did not
signal a break for assembly line workers while maintenance teams rectified the
problem. Each employee was invested in discovering the root problem and the solution
that would get the line up and running again. Though
the work-stop chain increased product quality dramatically, the general business
consensus in the U.S. even up to ten years ago was to continue to operate the
assembly line at 100 percent capacity defects or no defects. If a car came down
the line to the door handle installer but had no doors, it meant time for a quick
break. Cars came off the line without wheels or doors or handles. Without a work-stop
chain in place, workers overlooked defects, resulting in inferior products. The
solution: assigning not only work-stop authority, but accountability to assembly
workers. No longer allowed to pass defective or incomplete units to the next workstations,
workers were required to pull the chain and ensure "quality at the source." This
practice also made possible subsequent, systematic tracing of each problem to
its origin, so that it wouldn't happen again. So why
did this brilliant stroke of quality-mindedness stop at the assembly line when
the applicability of the philosophy so clearly extends into other areas of operation?
Most customer-facing operations we encounter are still mired in a pre-World War
II assembly line mindset. We've been in call centers, for example, where 100 frustrated
operators are standing up waving signs trying to alert an understaffed cadre of
supervisors about problems they're experiencing with customers on the phone. If
calls heat up, customers are frequently routed to special agents with authority
to bribe them into submission by throwing extra perks at them, a strategy that
has much in common with the old assembly line model where defective cars would
be transferred to an offline repair facility or sent to the scrap heap instead
of being built correctly in the first place. In the minds of some companies, the
call center assembly line has to keep moving at all costs - and the costs are
stated as numbers of customers. Most sales and service
operations face similar problems. The first obligation of most sales reps is to
meet their sales quotas, without regard for customer satisfaction. In high-volume
restaurants, wait staffs are instructed to do whatever they can to turn tables
over as many times a shift as possible. Consultants are pushed to maximize their
billable hours - emphasizing quantity over quality. Throughout the business world,
there is an obsession with operating the customer assembly line at full capacity.
The results are frequently and predictably abysmal. The American
Customer Satisfaction Index is lower today than it was when it was first calculated
eight years ago. Customer service, sales, and marketing are declining in quality
as they become more expensive, now accounting for 50 percent of corporate costs,
compared to 20 percent after World War II. In contrast, manufacturing and operations
expenses have gone from 50 percent of corporate costs after World War II to today's
level of 30 percent. It's time to borrow a page from the
manufacturing sector by arming front line workers with a virtual "work-stop chain."
If customer dissatisfaction is detected, hit the button. The workers responsible
for the task in question, along with their supervisors and co-workers, should
be empowered to perform on-the-spot correction and immediate root cause analysis
to prevent repeated mistakes. If a sales person notices that a new pricing strategy
is not flying with customers, or a retail agent faces a customer return that suggests
something is wrong with the product, have them "stop the line." Have a SWAT team
from headquarters supporting the front line, fixing problems as they occur and
feeding the lessons learned from the event back into the development pipeline
so that similar problems can be avoided in the future. Front
line employees are the real brand builders of any organization. It's the people
who are selling, delivering and servicing the brand who are in a very literal
sense the face and voice of the enterprise. So, why not empower them to do their
jobs, and do them right the first time? Most front line employees spend more time
with customers in one morning than brand managers do in a month - or a year. Why
not solicit their input on how products and services are designed, priced and
promoted? Needless to say, a work-stop policy would require
a heavy dose of training along the front lines, just as it did on factory floors.
Automotive manufacturer Saturn was one of the American pioneers with the work-stop
chain in its Spring Hill, TN plant in the early 1990s. The GM unit was so adamant
about training that it actually threatened to hold back up to 10 percent of every
employee's salary if all employees did not complete 92 hours of training each
year. Walk onto the floor of most manufacturing plants today and you'll not only
find the ubiquitous work-stop chain, but you'll find well-trained workers sitting
in air-conditioned rooms working in teams on Pareto charts and fishbone diagrams,
and walls covered with graphs and charts. The workers who are closest to the problems
are enlisted to improve processes they know well. The situation
is different for retail operations, sales forces and call centers, to be sure.
Employee turnover frequently exceeds 100 percent. New employees practice on-the-job
training using real customers as guinea pigs after only minimal introduction and
being provided with inadequate-to-nonexistent support. If the brand is defined
and reinforced by the quality of experiences with everyone and everything representing
it, brand managers must spend more time talking with the people out in the trenches,
the ones most responsible for this process. Giving them a virtual work-stop chain
might be a good first step toward opening this dialogue. | 
