Upon closure of the anchor manufacturing plan for PaperMate Pens, recruited a select group of 25 technical personnel to staff a support center; found a suitable lease space; prepared the site for occupancy; and led the satellite office to support international manufacturing operations.
I was faced with an organization that did not value the technical complexity of our business. To leadership, the technical team was an expensive part of overhead. I was mindful of this fact and kept costs low for the site and the move. Many compromises were required, like downsizing the toolroom and asking team players to take on new roles and responsibilities.
The team was under constant threat of downsizing. They had seen all of the other plant resources around them get laid off or relocated. My challenge was to keep morale positive and the team focused on the job at hand. I took the role of site champion to help leadership see the value being provided to the business by my team. I also spent a great deal of time helping my team to understand the goals and challenges of the business and leadership team. Pushing them to think creatively to contribute in new ways to the business.
The team went on to support relocated processes successfully, protecting sales of a $40MM product line from supply shortages. WIP inventories had reached zero and production backlog grew beyond capacity. My technical team stepped up to repair damaged processes, train operators and technicians and meet scheduled demand.
Diving deeper into one example, we relocated a precision machining process to India. My team was very disappointed in this decision to move a low labor, highly technical process to a low cost labor country. Morale was low, especially after the first processes were failing to deliver on quality and cost requiring extensive visits by technicians and engineers to repair machines. My team wanted to isolate the process from the people, fix the process, and show that this was a bad idea and they should move the process back to the US. I worked with both teams to increase training as designed by the technicians and give them voice in how to make positive changes. We set up tracking systems to identify progress and problems and improved communications when we were on opposite sides of the world. Performance improved but continued to lag US standards. The team however, was working constructively together.
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1) Why was this being done (situation)?
ReplyDelete2) What was the threat to the company, your team or yourself (threat)?
3) What was the value - $$ saved; growth - more clients, increased revenue, etc.;
4) Bonus (Prep for interview)- What was the biggest challenge faced in this project?