How to increase company´s profitability and improve its competitiveness?

Profitability increment and competitiveness improvement could be defined as an end goals that all companies strive for. In order to achieve these end goals there are another primary/strategic goals which companies must reach and I think these more or less are similar for all companies such as reliable plant, high product/service quality, delivering in time, competent employees, suitable leaders and brilliant marketing strategy. Behind each one of these terms lies one or more of the following words Who, How, Where, When and What. I am trying to dig deeper to find out and highlight the real, asset, systems, elements, tools, methods etc in which their contribution is significant that companies can reach their goals.
Who?
Companies cannot maximize profitability and reinforce competitiveness regardless of process, equipment, tools etc it has in place if “Who” is not considered properly. People are most significant asset in which must be taken into consideration.
An assumption:
When our brains are sufficient charged with information, experiences and knowledge then logically we will do whatever is good for our bodies. We will for instance eat a good food, sleep well and do physical movements such as exercises or usually train regularly to activate our muscles to make them stronger especially our arms and legs because they almost do all the work, in order to live longer and avoid many diseases.
Is it essential that we must train and activate our muscles even we do not use this strength daily? The answer is yes, actually the whole body needs to be strong not only our arms and legs to be able to perform the daily work for long term and to be equipped whether any unusual task occurs during the time.
Well, managers, designers, engineers are in general the brain of any company however the workers are company´s arms and legs. If the management has sufficient knowledge, education, experiences and information then it will provide the company/plant with a suitable guideline and satisfy personnel’s needs, however the staff is company´s arms and legs because they almost perform all the work. If they get an adequate education, training, moral, motivation, encouragement they will do the best of the best.
How?
Does that mean workers cannot think, or plan because they are not the”Brain”? Absolutely not, but often they do what they have been told, or what they have been learned, which means there is a manager/leader who always set up work instructions. How can we be sure that the manager or the leader is always right? Well, this is a good point and the answer is “we cannot”.
Such mistakes could be reduced when managers use brainstorming and empower plants operators, further new and valuable ideas could appears during this process and maybe one of these ideas is the suitable solution. Do you think all managers use this strategy when any problem occurs, are they not afraid of3P-losses? Actually, not all managers are willing to carry out this strategy due to fearing of losing power, profit and pride, on the other hand a part of them are not aware about the importance of this strategy.
How important is it to involve operators when any problem occurs? Well, it’s very important, because the operators are almost “married with machines” and when a man or woman is married with someone logically she /he knows everything about her/him, because operators spend long time with their machines almost 8-9h/5 day and sometimes more. This enables them to know machines best performance, its requirements, failure modes and mechanism, and “often” the causes.
Furthermore the following requirements should be an important part of answering “How”.
1. Establishing continues improvement strategy leads to eliminate waste in all its forms, cost reduction, production flow & production strategy enhancement, process and quality improvement.
2. Maximizing plant reliability by establishing a suitable maintenance strategy and its best practices.
3. Continuously analysis around customer’s wishes and requirements, marketing demands including company´s competitors.
4. Personnel training, partner relationship (instead of Supplier and Customer relationship) among different department, communications improvement between management and workers at the same time among different departments such as operation, maintenance, store, design, purchase etc.
5. Leadership engagement, understanding, and strategic strategy.
Where?
The manager/leader should be near machines and equipment where most of the work performs and things happen preferably ”Gemba”. Firstly, it is not reasonable to trust workers assessment 100%, even they spend long time with machines and have such experiences and knowledge, thus the data and information must be tested and evaluated. Secondly, operators often need backup, supervision and support when new things occur. However CEO and other manager should be in their “Gemba” to figure out what is going on out there. They have to analyze the market to assess and evaluate company´s current condition and its future based on competitor’s offers and customers requirements, through being in the right place. That does not mean CEO or other managers must not being in the work floor, on the contrary their presence is beneficial and I will talk about it in the next section.
When?
Most failures could be detected in earlier stage by using visual monitoring or other tools. Normally it gives signal/indicator. It could also be called a “failure mode” such as high vibration, high noise, corrosion, smoke, friction, fatigue, debris, high temperature etc. That means the presence and the engagement of the leader/manager in the work floor is crucial because he/she could act in real time before it develops to the next advanced mode. Additionally, its vital to avoid catastrophic failures, unscheduled downtime, prolonging machines and equipment lives and to prevent productions outages and human injuries. The investment in “Who” within training and empowerment leads in return to huge benefits. If the operators have a sufficient training they can take the right action in real time instead of waiting for the leader/manager in case he/she is not available in this moment. Furthermore the job continues from inside the plant to outside the plant where the analysts and designers should be. They must continuously have a holistic picture around customer’s needs, marketing’s demands and competitor’s strategy. Why, to act in real time and do what it requires to stand longer in the market with a good profit margin.  Companies should consider customers perspective In earlier stage such design phase to adapt their products with  respect to what competitors’ can offer when talking about price, quality, delivering time, services etc. As well, companies should focus more on customer’s satisfaction and work hardly to achieve it. Additional benefits can be obtained when CEO and other managers continuously visit work floor, such as listening to workers problems and needs, observation, enhancing the relationship with them within encouragement and motivation which can lead to increase their moral and loyalty.
What?
In order to increase Profitability & improve competitiveness ”end goals” and achieve the primary / company´s strategic goals actually, there are many useful tools, systems, process and methodologies. I just want to highlight something important. From maintenance point of view there is something called”Maintenance best practices”. Actually, it’s not a law such as Kirchhoff’s Law or another math/physics Laws. It could be defined as “every technique, process, methodologies, tools etc you or somebody else already have used it and got a reasonable and good result”. The main issue is to reach your target(s) with a good and reasonable result regardless of what technique, system, tools etc you use, assuming that you already have made an assessment and evaluating between what you use and other alternatives. But anyway I will also mention some of these powerful techniques, systems, tools, methodologies etc.
Before I go further I would like to put more focus on the leadership and its contribution within the entire process. Beyond engagement, brainstorming, and operator’s empowerment strategy the manager/leader should act sometimes as a teacher. For example he/she must not ask who has done this fault? The question should be what is the problem and how can we solve it? To blame operators when they do faults does not solve any problem, but it could lead to something worse. The leader could show the direction to the right job and how it could be done right.
Generally, the implementation of Lean & Six Sigma, PdM, PM, RCM, TPM- technologies have almost showed a good result in most industrial companies. All of these technologies more or less are good, but sometimes you need to combine two or more of them in order to achieve your targets and being on the safe side. I will not dig deeper in this topic because it is not the issue to make an evaluation among different maintenance strategies. However, the selection of the most suitable maintenance strategy/best practices should be based on the following:
1. An identifying and defining of company´s strategic goals”Vision” What they want to achieve and the”Mission” what they have obtained.
2. A measurement of the “Gap” between the “Vision” and the “Mission”.
3. Analysis and classifying of the problems (technical, organizational, managerial, wrong construction, wrong integration, wrong design, latent faults or human factors)
4. Product(s), machines, and equipment.
5. All solution alternatives and decisions should be evaluated based on LCCA
However there are some useful and significant tools in which can be used and utilized within problem identifying, troubleshooting, problem analysis, project evaluating, planning and problem solving to accomplish the process of achievement company´s goals based on cost-effective methodology. These are RCA, FMECA, LCCA, FTA, DMAIC (VSM, Process mapping, pull production, JIT etc), VOC etc. I want also mention some high technology tools which can be used to analyze and monitor for example rotating machines such as vibration monitoring-tools, thermo graphic and oil analysis-tools.
It’s a vital that manager/leader has qualification and awareness in analysis and experiences on observations which enables him/her to know where, when, how and what to look at and observe, otherwise more things could be missed.

Best regards

Hamid Al-najjar