The Importance of Agility in Today’s Economic Environment
Vast uncertainties make operating a business in today’s economic environment difficult—being able to respond quickly to unexpected events is critical. Perhaps the most striking example of efficiency can be found at the heart of a large oval, amid the roar of engines and the cheers of the crowd.
In less time than it takes to power on your phone, Red Bull Racing broke the pit stop record for the third time in one season. During Max Verstappen’s first stop of the Formula 1 Brazilian Grand Prix, his crew had him back on the track in an amazing 1.82 seconds,1 shaving six hundredths off their previous record. Not only did Verstappen finish first in that race, Red Bull set a new world record for tire changing that year and defended the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award.
The Grand Prix, the most coveted championship in motorsports, began more than 70 years ago. Since then, racing crews have been continuously improving their capabilities. In the race’s first decade, a car’s pit stop time lasted about 67 seconds—a time that has been reduced to a mere 2-2.5 seconds2 on average today.
Time is everything in Formula One. And just as important as those who stand on the podium are the heroes in the driver’s pit crew. One to three times per race, a team of 20 people must perform 36 tasks in perfect synchronization. Their ability to respond quickly can make or break a race.
Each member of the pit crew has a specific set of tasks and only several tenths of a second to complete them. Tasks range from replacing tires to fixing mechanical problems. There are mechanics responsible for wing adjustments, stabilizing the car, and one for cleaning the driver’s visor.3
There isn’t time to see that everyone’s carried out their tasks. As a team, they need complete confidence that each crew member has completed their tasks correctly and is out of the way. This is where training comes in.
The training goal for each team member is to improve their performance through constant repetition. The team logs hundreds of hours of training each year following set protocols. And years of technological and mechanical development have allowed these crews to account for every possible contingency. After seventy years, pit stop times have decreased nearly 96%!
You, obviously, won’t have the luxury of hundreds of hours of training for each of your team members. But you can give them the resources they need to execute quickly and accurately on every critical procedure. You can also help them be more agile when the unexpected comes up—even if they haven’t been trained on it before. On the track and in business, consistency and learning-while-doing is essential:
Just as F1 pit crews have evolved to execute their tasks with more precision and in increasingly shorter amounts of time, so have top performing businesses.
The most efficient and productive companies have evolved to help their teams move faster and eliminate errors. They’ve incorporated lean practices, streamlined procedures, and adopted tools to make their teams more autonomous.
When you replace paperwork instructions with digital and make relevant information available to front-line teams, you can expect a higher level of precision. Teams who can execute standard work consistently are inherently in a better position to respond when things go wrong.
It’s also important to ease into a transformation. All too often, we see customers, eager to adopt a new process or tackle a challenge in their business, stall out before they get started.
No matter how challenging, any initiative can be tackled bit by bit. Unfortunately, when we try to do too much at once, it can lead to confusion and chaos instead of productivity.
As you begin to think about all the different departments, people, and resources needed to pull off a big change, it can feel overwhelming. Sometimes frustration with the distance to the goal can discourage us from getting started.
Breaking down a big problem piece by piece is the most efficient way to tackle those big challenges—put another way, how we set goals plays a big part in whether we achieve them. Small, simple steps make it easier for your team to confidently deal with change and solve problems.
Just because you’re working on the project incrementally, doesn’t mean you won’t see results until the end. But first, it’s important to deal with the inevitable surprises along the way.
There are many uncertainties that make operating a business in today’s economic environment difficult: The ripple effect of supply chain issues that started during the pandemic. Unexpected and devastating weather and political events. Inflation, rising interest rates, and the possibility of a recession. None of these are knowable or controllable.
In the manufacturing industry, it’s estimated that one hour of downtime can mean as much as $6.45 million in losses,4 making something as simple as a power outage extremely costly.
What about human error? A misplaced comma or an extra zero on a contract. Training an employee and leaving out an important step. Misreading a document with poor resolution. These mistakes can add up quickly.
Fortunately, there are tools that can help your workforce be prepared to respond—as efficiently as a pit crew confronting a blown tire.
A reaction plan or troubleshooting guide can help you and your team minimize damage when the unexpected inevitably happens. Thinking through the steps to take when a problem occurs and making them easily available to your team can save tremendous time and resources.
It’s one thing to have a reaction plan. But if it’s hidden on a shared drive that nobody knows about or kept only in the minds of your maintenance team, the response during an unexpected issue will likely take too long.
Instead, make your reaction plans available alongside your digital work instructions. That way, they’ll be accessible to everyone who needs them. For commonly occurring issues, use a QR code at the point of use to access the tasks and reduce the response time even further.
The typical failure rate in businesses using common work practices ranges from 10 to 30 errors per hundred activities5. Whatever can be done to simplify a response will reduce the fallout.
Even if you don’t have a single process documented in writing, you can still get your team trained and operating more efficiently. You just want to work it out in a contained space first.
One of our customers is a durable goods manufacturer with a common process that requires planned downtime 20-30 times per day on each line, at each of their facilities.
The continuous improvement team knew the process could be done more efficiently. Rather than try to change the process in every plant, or even on every line, they picked one line on which to get started.
They found every team member working the line had a different way of performing the procedure and none of them were documented. On average, the downtime for the process was 15 minutes.
After determining the most efficient way to perform the process, they retrained the team on the job. They provided Acadia to the employees so they could follow the new process step-by-step and the CI team could track compliance.
After two weeks of training and using the new method, the team improved average downtime by 8 minutes. The change on that line alone saved the company $500,000. With that kind of success, and a clear approach to solving the problem, the CI team could more easily take the change out to other lines and facilities.
Our customers consistently describe dramatic improvements in agility after adopting Acadia. They can respond faster to any situation because every employee knows where to turn for the answer.
For example, early in the pandemic, a manufacturing customer converted one of their production lines to make hand sanitizer. When manufacturing was losing 1.33 million jobs,6 our customer was able to improvise and adapt.
By updating their SOPs in Acadia with the new product procedure, their team ran the same line just as efficiently.
Another customer, an auto parts distributor, got stuck when one of their picking robots failed. The engineer who installed the machine had recently moved to another location. But before he left, he provided a trouble-shooting guide in Acadia. This enabled the contributors on the floor to quickly find an answer to their problem—saving hours of downtime.
It’s not just managers and leaders who can help make the team more agile. When an operator at a CPG customer tried to use the new dock door in her facility, she found it unintuitive. After reviewing the manual, she quickly created work instructions in Acadia so the rest of her team didn’t have to. Spending an hour of her time, she saved tens of hours of training and confusion for everyone else.
When the unexpected happens, don’t lose time with your team waiting to receive direction. Instead, provide a single source of truth they can go to for the answer.
And it doesn’t have to happen all at once. Create work instructions for your most important procedures and contingencies for errors that happen frequently. Then expand your knowledge base over time to cover more of the business.
For those who can see the big picture, but take small steps to get there, the rewards can take them places they wouldn’t have thought possible.
A training manager that worked for one of our first customers had just volunteered to lead a training program for new leaders with limited industry experience. The program was designed to expose new leaders to different aspects of production. After learning more, they could select the roles they wanted to pursue.
Training a large group of people on a wide range of topics in a short amount of time was a big task. The training manager used Acadia to provide resources to the trainees while they were doing their work, as well as to check their comprehension. In the end, the program was a success. The new employees spread out across the company and many went on to lead transformative projects of their own, while the training manager eventually became the global product leader.
We’ve learned a lot working with our customers to solve a wide variety of problems. The important thing is to start today so you won’t be caught unprepared when the unexpected happens tomorrow.
If you have a project you’ve been struggling to get off the ground, reach out. We’d love to talk it through with you.
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