Breaking Barriers, Building Alignment: Specialty Thermoplastics Company Gains Workforce Buy-in with High Performance Workshop

This global manufacturer of specialty thermoplastics for aerospace, mass transit, medical equipment, and other high-performance solutions is always looking for ways to improve business performance while protecting and enhancing the company’s good reputation. Currently, company leadership is intensely working on creating more capacity without investing capital in additional production lines. The company produces bespoke materials in small quantities with short lead times, prioritizing product quality and operational efficiency. Through advanced manufacturing techniques and strategic partnerships, the organization focuses on delivering customer satisfaction and business performance.

Balancing complex production demands to deliver tailored products to global customers with diverse needs

Every facility across this organization is tasked with managing a dynamic production schedule that balances a diverse array of sales orders, raw material inputs, product specifications, customer demands, and specialized manufacturing processes. The company designs every site to meet customers’ unique production requirements—ranging from small, custom batches to larger-scale manufacturing runs. This adaptability ensures the business can meet the varied needs of its global customer base.

Results achieved with this engagement

• Developed strategies to reduce cycle times and increase throughput, without sacrificing quality
• Established an improvement plan and secured enthusiastic buy-in from all team members
• Ignited a culture shift from “business as usual” to “embracing innovation”
• Created alignment across the workforce, processes, and technology, in support of business goals

Meeting customer commitments carries costly tradeoffs

Schedule management is a critical undertaking for every plant, and for some facilities it’s a particularly demanding process. Coordinating a vast array of sales orders, product specifications, and raw material requirements is no small feat, even for seasoned operations teams with decades of experience. Every day, the workforce applies their operational expertise, deep process knowledge, and results-oriented dedication to achieve first-rate performance.

Typical of professionals across the company ecosystem, the schedulers are highly proficient and fully committed to the posture of operational excellence on which the company has built its reputation. According to the company’s vice president of operations, “Like many companies around the world, the tradeoff for viable production schedules, schedule adherence, and meeting customer delivery commitments is usually excess raw materials inventory and long lead times. Ultimately, these tradeoffs stand in the way of even greater operational efficiency, cost control, cash flow, and perhaps even customer satisfaction.”

Uncovering barriers to business performance growth

Globally, the organization is always looking for ways to improve business performance while protecting and enhancing the company’s good reputation. Specifically, it’s intensely focused on creating more capacity without investing capital in additional production lines. The management team at headquarters tasked two senior leaders to zero in and focus on two specific plants.

They took some time to study and catalog the two facilities’ strengths, what made them unique in relation to the industry at large and culturally, which processes were potential or definite operational weaknesses, and prioritize the plant’s greatest opportunities. The exercise revealed several critical gaps hindering the team’s ability to drive ongoing growth in business performance:

1. Identifying bottlenecks in production
2. Optimizing inventory and raw material planning to improve lead times
3. Meeting and sustaining on-time delivery performance

Although the facilities were probably already aware of these weaknesses, no significant efforts had been made by the company to address them. The schedulers relied on intricate spreadsheets and extensive tribal knowledge to keep their respective facilities running. Ultimately, however, the plants needed to frequently disrupt workflows to accommodate orders, which led to material losses and inefficiencies.

Since the operations executive had experienced a similar scenario at a previous company, he believes that an advanced production scheduling system will arm the schedulers with more powerful capabilities to produce optimal shop floor schedules. The leadership pair also concluded that a rather large area of opportunity is enhancing visibility around the decisions that go into building the production schedule. In particular, they want schedulers to have the ability to run scenarios that show the connection between scheduling and customer service.

Enlisting a trusted partner for innovative workshop

Both executives are confident that equipping the plants with contemporary scheduling software will greatly enhance their performance. However, they also recognize that even highly experienced operations professionals may be reluctant to embrace new techniques. Based on the operations VP’s experience, the consultants and engineers from On Time Edge helped his previous company overcome similar challenges. He and the IT VP made the decision to enlist On Time Edge to conduct its high performance flow workshop for the operations teams.

What they wanted to achieve with the On Time Edge workshop was to align the team with business objectives, and promote buy-in for the changes ahead. Key alignment and buy-in expectations included:

• Ensure cross-functional teams communicate using clear, unified terminology
• Identify ways to simplify processes and enhance effectiveness
• Foster a culture of innovation and open dialogue
• Secure support for automating routine tasks and leveraging technology for better visibility
• Empower the workforce to take an active role in executing priorities

Workshop designed to change perspectives

The three-day workshop was held onsite at the company’s facility and included team members from every discipline throughout the plant and everyone who would be directly affected by process or technology changes. These spanned manufacturing operations, the scheduling team, supply chain, engineering, and sales, plus three members of the leadership team.

At the beginning of the first day, most of the participants — including some in supervisory and leadership roles — were skeptical that any changes to their processes or adding technology could have an impact on throughput, cycle times, lead times, or even inventory or materials planning. Some workshop participants even expressed that the company’s current planning and scheduling methods are ideal, given the distinct nature of nearly all customer orders. Despite reservations and skepticism, the team applied themselves to see what they could uncover.

From the outset, the workshop facilitators guided the cross-functional group through exercises to simulate real-world factory problems and to emphasize the differing effects of various strategies on efficiency gains and losses. The workshop continued with rounds of collaborative problem-solving to identify bottlenecks and efficiency opportunities.

As they immersed themselves in the program, everyone's posture and attitude visibly evolved from "cautious and doubtful" to "enthusiastic and optimistic." The stakeholders were pleased to see the shift in team members’ attitudes as the exercises demonstrated how even subtle process changes in different departments can significantly impact the overall outcome. Participants experienced firsthand how every role and department contributes to results, fostering a sense of accountability and cooperation. The operations vice president remarked, “We witnessed a cultural transformation right before our eyes.”

Leaders see cultural shift from resistance to enthusiasm

It wasn't long into the workshop agenda that team members from various departments were relating the exercises to their actual day-to-day processes and struggles. What's more, they were openly brainstorming and making suggestions about how different process changes could improve production scheduling, inventory and materials planning, throughput, and lead times. According to the vice president of IT, “What surprised me most was our team’s enthusiasm and level of engagement.”

The IT executive continued, “We absolutely got the workforce shift we wanted with the workshop, but we also got a few unexpected bonuses. The exercises and candid discussions revealed inefficiencies and processes that we weren’t even aware of. Some have been in use for 20 or 30 years and were “baked” into the organization or function over time. More than once, someone on the leadership team interjected, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that. We need to revisit that later.’”

The “bonus” revelations are new, unexpected opportunities to get clarity and create even more alignment and efficiency. By the end of the third day, the three leaders and all the participants declared the workshop a success, expressing tremendous optimism about the changes that lay ahead. The production schedulers in particular shifted from resistant to eagerly anticipating better processes supported by modern technology.

The workshop enabled the leadership team to achieve what they set out to accomplish: Put the right metrics in place, with a clear path to have the right people executing the right processes, supported by the right technology. The IT leader commented, “We aim to put a sustainable, focused plan in place that will support long-term business growth. However, the plan's success hinges on the active involvement of our team members. The On Time Edge workshop helped us secure the workforce buy-in necessary to make the plan successful.”

The leadership team went on to explain how the workshop exercises helped them identify the right KPIs to support the business objectives they have been given. Yield efficiency and cost per unit are two examples that will help plants focus daily on contributing to the goals put forth by headquarters: improve business performance while protecting and enhancing the company’s good reputation.

For example, the production schedulers and the customer service teams already work very well together. However, the workshop revealed definite opportunities to help them communicate better and more quickly iterate through what-if scenarios. Both groups are excited about how an advanced scheduling application would give them the power to analyze scenarios for sequencing orders or how different rules impact outcomes like customer delivery dates.

The people conducting each workshop is a critical success factor — ultimately it’s about how quickly and efficiently consultants can help a team uncover root challenges. The IT leader observed that, “The On Time Edge experts made every hour extremely efficient; it was time wisely-spent for every single participant. They sent us industry and continuous improvement experts who guided us to zero in on specific issues and nuances – those were the animated discussions everyone in the room found most helpful.”

The operations leader explained why they chose the partner they did: “The difference with On Time Edge is their consultants’ expertise. They quickly earned the participants’ trust, respect, and active participation, and didn’t let anyone waste time talking about things we can easily address on our own.”

Shifting gears from planning to execution: Exciting road ahead for Plant Operations

While this story highlights two regional plants’ operations and culture transformation and ongoing operations improvement, it’s just the beginning of a new transformation journey. The operations and IT leaders acknowledge that there’s still work to be done—they have already identified which production scheduling software will be put in. When the time comes, the plants plan to run their existing processes alongside the new software for the first 90 days so they can demonstrate improvements. They fully anticipate the business value will more than offset implementation costs.

The plants intend to achieve considerable cost savings in material usage, improved labor efficiency, and greater machine uptime. The team will demonstrate clear, measurable benefits that will justify investments in automation to support daily work, and in partnership with On Time Edge, they have established a data-backed business value framework.

The operations executive’s final thoughts on the workshop and the mission set for him by his company’s headquarters: “Strategic planning, external collaboration with a trusted partner, and effective change management are certainly key ingredients for transformation success. In the long run, team alignment, cross-functional collaboration, and the right digital tools will be critical for long-term efficiency gains and business results. We are looking forward to having our On Time Edge as our partner over the long haul.”