Let the frontline workers decide

Taking the consultants’ advice, the managers of the motorcycle company asked teams of frontline workers to recommend ways to get customers back. They paid thousands of dollars to train the workers in the process of critical thinking and problem solving.

     After the teams broke down the big question “Why aren’t customers buying our motorcycles” into smaller parts, they decided several additional questions had to be answered before quality could be improved:

• Why are we losing money?
• Where is the poor quality showing up in our motorcycles?
• Why is poor quality occurring?

Here’s what the employees discovered:

1. Parts for the motorcycles were placed on hooks and carried through the plant to the workers on a complex series of wires that resembled a moving clothesline.
2. When a line worker needed a part to use in a motorcycle, the person reached up and took it off the hook.
3. If the part was made wrong or was broken, the worker had to call a manager to decide what to do.
4. The worker then had to wait for the part to be repaired or use a bad part.

Either way, important time was wasted, or the motorcycles were assembled with poor quality materials. Both of these caused the company to lose money.

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