WMBA 6040 Week 8 Final Plan and Sustain Reflection Example

The Revised Plan and Who Holds the Number Afterward: Final Improvement Plan for Coated Lens Turnaround at a Wholesale Optical Lab, With a Control Plan, an Owner for Each Measure and the Early Signal of Sliding Back

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Walden University

WMBA 6040: Improving Business Performance

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Month Day, Year

The Revised Plan and Who Holds the Number Afterward: Final Improvement Plan for Coated Lens Turnaround at a Wholesale Optical Lab, With a Control Plan, an Owner for Each Measure and the Early Signal of Sliding Back

Revisions in Response to Critique

Reviewers of the Week 7 plan for Clearwater, the made-up optical lab studied all term, raised three points, and the plan now answers each.

First, reviewers judged the link between waiting and coating defects too uncertain to promise a yield gain. The revised plan promises turnaround, the outcome the queue cap and the four-run schedule act on directly, and treats yield as a result to be tested. A two-week trial will run the four-run schedule on one formulation first, and the defect rates of that formulation and the others will be compared before the schedule is extended.

Second, reviewers asked for frame holds to be included, since a job waiting three days for a frame is late through no fault of production. The revised plan adds one low-cost step: customer service calls every practice whose frame is more than two days late, which the frame hold measure already triggers. Incomplete orders remain in a second phase.

Third, reviewers found ownership unclear between the coating supervisor and the production manager. The revised plan gives the production manager ownership of turnaround and the queue cap, and the coating supervisor ownership of the run schedule and the oldest-tray measure, with a fifteen-minute review of both every Monday.

The Revised Plan in Brief

Table 1

Revised Changes, Owners and First Read Dates

All figures and dates are for a composite lab; week numbers count from the start of the changes.

Expected results are unchanged from the Week 7 plan for turnaround and trays in process. The yield target is now stated as a hypothesis to be tested in the two-week trial.

Reflection: Keeping the Gain After the Project Ends

The harder question is what happens after the project. Improvements in operations often fade. Bateman (2005), studying process improvement workshops in manufacturing companies, found that many gains were not sustained and that sustainability depended on factors such as follow-up actions being completed and a process for maintaining the change after the improvement team disbanded. Repenning and Sterman (2001) explained why: when an improvement works, the problems it prevents become invisible, and managers under pressure shift attention and resources back to fighting visible fires, so the capabilities that produced the improvement erode.

At Clearwater, the risk is specific. Running coating four times a day adds roughly an hour and a half of labor daily. In a busy week, with the coating crew short a person, the easiest saving will be to go back to two runs. The queue cap will feel like idle capacity in surfacing on days with few uncoated jobs, and someone will lift it to keep surfacing busy. Neither decision will look like abandoning the plan. Each will look like a reasonable response to that week.

Who Holds the Number

A gain measured once stays measured only if someone owns the measure after the project. The plan assigns each of the five measures to a manager whose job continues regardless of the project: turnaround to the production manager, oldest tray to the coating supervisor, yield to the quality lead, and frame holds and incomplete orders to the customer service manager. The measures are calculated automatically from tray scans and posted each Monday on a board in the production office and in the weekly operations report, so they do not depend on the analyst who built them.

The Early Signal

Turnaround is a lagging measure; by the time it worsens, the cause is a week old. The early signal of sliding back is the oldest tray at coating. If the schedule quietly returns to two runs, the oldest tray will rise above 36 hours within two or three days, well before turnaround moves. The control plan therefore sets one rule: if the oldest tray exceeds 36 hours on two consecutive mornings, the production manager reviews the coating schedule that day. A second signal is the Thursday queue count; a queue above 500 trays means the cap has been lifted or ignored. Goldratt and Cox (2004) also warned that relieving a constraint can move it to another step, so the Monday review should glance at the edging queue too; if coating improves and edging begins to back up, the constraint has moved and the plan's next phase should follow it.

Making the Change Part of the Standard

The four-run schedule and the queue cap will be written into the lab's standard operating procedures for coating and surfacing, with the reason for each, so that a new supervisor inherits the rule and its purpose. Without the purpose, the rule looks like an arbitrary inefficiency and will be the first thing a new manager removes.

What I Would Watch Personally

If I were the manager responsible, I would watch for my own impatience. The yield effect will take weeks to read, and I would be tempted to declare success on turnaround alone and move to the next project. Repenning and Sterman's argument suggests that the moment an improvement seems finished is the moment it begins to erode, which is why the Monday review continues after the project closes.

Training New Supervisors

One more safeguard concerns people who arrive after the project. The lab hires or promotes two or three supervisors a year. Each new supervisor in surfacing, coating or edging will be walked through the coated-lens map, the five measures and the reasons for the four-run schedule and the queue cap during their first week. A one-page summary of the project, written for someone who was not there, will be kept with the procedures. This matters because the people who remember why the changes were made will not be there forever, and a rule whose reason is forgotten tends to be dropped the first time it is inconvenient.

References

Bateman, N. (2005). Sustainability: The elusive element of process improvement. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 25(3), 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443570510581862

Goldratt, E. M., & Cox, J. (2004). The goal: A process of ongoing improvement (3rd rev. ed.). North River Press.

Repenning, N. P., & Sterman, J. D. (2001). Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened: Creating and sustaining process improvement. California Management Review, 43(4), 64-88. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166101