All these years I was getting it wrong. For 7 years I’ve spoke to, written content, developed messaging, and driven product direction for manufacturers. And in those 7 years I’ve centered those actions on what I believed was most important to manufacturers…. efficiency. Manufacturers care about the extent to which time, effort or cost is well used for the intended task or purpose, right? Well, this week I had an epiphany and learned that I was wrong.
This week I read the book “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement”. Written in the early 80s, it’s a fiction (but kinda non-fiction) book about a plant manager’s journey to save a manufacturing plant from shutting down. It’s also, as I’ve learned from many conversations, a Bible of sorts for manufacturers. And I’m ashamed to admit that I had never read it.
When speaking with manufacturers I would use words like “simplify”, “efficiency”, “increase speed”, “operational expense”, “responsiveness”, and “high performance”. But there was one word I never used; THROUGHPUT.
As defined in the book, “Throughput is the money coming in”. Manufacturers care about the money coming in. “Throughput is most important, then inventory – due to its impact on throughput and only then, at the tail, comes operating expenses. You must move from the cost world to the throughput world.”
In order to do this, companies must focus on developing a process of on-going improvement. Below is the process of improvement defined in the book.
- Identify the system’s bottlenecks.
- Decide how to exploit the bottlenecks.
- Subordinate everything else to the above decision. Make sure everything marches to the tune of the constraints.
- Elevate the system’s bottlenecks.
- If, in a previous step, a bottleneck has been broken go back to step 1.
Would you believe that marketing actually aligns with this process? It does. And with the rapid progress of technology, and the change in buyer behavior, the influence marketing has on throughput is increasing. Over the next few weeks I’m going to breakdown each of the 5 steps and align them with the responsibilities of a marketing organization. I’ll also cover how to identify those numerical measures that will eliminate the skepticism found with subjective preferences.
They say the biggest challenge is identifying the problems. Next week I’ll discuss how to identify those problems, and their corresponding bottlenecks, within your Modern Manufacturing Marketing organization.
And I vow to focus on improving your throughput, and less on improving your efficiencies!