Manufacturing glossary of terms

Absenteeism can be defined as any absence from work that extends beyond what would be considered reasonable and customary due to vacation, personal time, or occasional illness.

John Adair, a British academic and leadership theorist, authored more than forty books (translated into eighteen languages) on business, military, and other leadership.

Adair’s Action Centred Leadership model describes leadership in terms of three interlocking or overlapping elements of responsibility and concern, highlighting the relationship between them:

1. The needs of the task.

2. The needs of the team.

3. The needs of the individual.

These three elements should be the main focus of leadership and therefore, should be constantly considered: achieving the common task; developing and meeting the needs of individual team members; and building and maintaining the team. If all three elements are satisfied, then the team becomes effective, achieving the required results.

The Affinity Diagram is a problem solving technique used to capture large amounts of ideas, opinions, issues and causes. It organises them into natural categories/groups based on their relationship (unlike the cause-and-effect diagram that has pre-determined categories/groups).

Business Aims, or Goals, are considered to be the long-term strategic goals that are set over 3−5 years and are deemed vital or critical in achieving the business vision.

Andon is part of the visual management system that is used to notify operators and managers when a problem occurs and when support/assistance is required. These can be activated manually (pull cord or button) or automatically (machine settings or sensors).

Used in ISO 14001 as the main planning element, Aspects and Impacts help determine how the aspects of our work/job and the products or services for the company impact the environment. 

Using our Aspects and Impacts assessment templates, we can RAG rate the impacts to better prioritise those that we can control and improve.

This is the process developed by the Manufacturers Network to RAG rate all of our equipment, activities and processes. The Asset Criticality process looks at what happens when it fails or goes wrong and what effect it will have on:

1. Safety and legal.

2. Hygiene.

3. Availability.

4. Performance.

5. Quality.

6. Reliability.

7. Maintainability.

8. Environment.

9. Cost.

10. SPF - single point of failure.

A systematic and independent examination to determine whether quality activities and related results/outputs, including H&S and environmental impacts, comply with planned arrangements and whether those arrangements are effective and suitable to achieve objectives.

Availability of equipment means exactly that. Is the equipment available to use and produce quality products? This measure considers all unplanned downtime losses.

Phil Baguley was an author and management consultant in the UK and mainland Europe.

Through his research, Baguley identified Four Main Teams and describes their purposes foundin organisations.

Teams which provide management or control of activities:

• Senior management/leadership team oversees or co-ordinates activity on an ongoing and continuous basis. Sets direction and activities of the organisation.

• Specific project teams to oversee time limited projects.

Teams which make something:

• Production teams.

Teams which do something:

• Sales.

• Finance.

• Marketing.

• Customer service.

Teams which evaluate or make recommendations:

• Problem solving.

• Continuous improvement.

Today, we can describe many other organisational teams, such as cross functional teams, permanent teams, functional teams, virtual teams, group teams, Kaizen teams.

The Balanced Scorecard is a management tool developed to help businesses focus on four key areas:

1. Financial performance.

2. Customer knowledge.

3. Internal business processes.

4. Learning and growth.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is the highest level of national recognition for performance excellence that a U.S. organisation can receive.

1. The award focuses on five elements:

2. Product and process outcomes.

3. Customer outcomes.

4. Workforce outcomes.

5. Leadership and governance outcomes.

6. Financial and market outcomes.

Behaviours can be described as the way we act or conduct ourselves and they are: observable, recordable and describable.

Belbin created a theory that divided the supposed roles created in teams into nine categories that facilitate a team’s success:

• Shapers: are challenging individuals and provide the necessary drive and courage to overcome obstacles and ensure that the team are kept moving and do not lose focus or momentum.

• Implementers: are needed to plan a practical, workable strategy and carry it out as efficiently as possible.

• Completer finishers: are most effectively used at the end of a task to ‘polish’ and edit the work to the best of their abilities.

• The co-ordinator: this person works collaboratively with others, tends to avoid group conflict and focuses on the team objectives.

• Team worker: helps the team to gel, they are co-operative, mild, perceptive and diplomatic.

• Resource investigators: provide inside knowledge on the opposition and make sure that the team’s idea will carry to the world outside the team.

• The plant: this person tends to work better alone, is creative, imaginative, unorthodox and solves difficult problems.

• The monitor evaluator: this person is needed to provide a logical eye, make impartial judgements where required and weigh up the team’s options in a dispassionate way. 

• Specialists: tend to be single minded, self-starting and dedicated, they have in-depth knowledge and skills that are required by the team.

Benchmarking is the best practice way of finding an individual or business who/which is doing something well and using them as a reference to set the bar for improvement (comparing apples to apples).

The Benefit Versus Ease Analysis is a decision-making technique that allows us to compare two factors:

1. How easy is this to implement?

2. How big is the benefit or impact on the root cause of the problem? Normally performed on a 2 x 2 or 3 x 3 grid template, with the upper most right quadrant being the highest ease and biggest benefit.

Best Practice is the term used to describe a standout or best way to do something.

The Managerial Grid was introduced in 1964 by Robert R Blake and Jane S Mouton. Now known as the Leadership GridTM, it is a framework for understanding management behaviour that focuses on the extent to which managers are people or task orientated. It does so by defining two primary concerns for a manager: 

• Y Axis = concern for people.

• X Axis = concern for production (sometimes referred to as concern for task).

The five basic management styles are identified by plotting managers’ levels of concern for results (X) against their concern for people (Y) on a 9 x 9 grid.

Country club management: (high people/low results) sometimes, you need to rest your team, take your foot off the accelerator, and accommodate their needs. This may be for a break, for team building or perhaps for development.

Team management: (high people/high results) this style is the most effective approach. This is routed in McGregor’s Theory Y. It is the most solid leadership style, with a balance of strong concern for both the means and the end. A manager using this style will encourage commitment, contribution, responsibility, and personal and team development. This builds a long-term sustainable and resilient team. 

Authority compliance management: (high results/low people) authoritarian managers want to control and dominate their team - possibly for personal reasons or an unhealthy psychological need. They don’t care about their people; they just want the results of their endeavours.

Impoverished management: (low results/low people) this is an ineffective management style, in which an indifferent manager largely avoids engaging with their people or the needs of the job at hand. Such managers reason (wrongly) that if you don’t do much, little can go wrong and you won’t get blamed.

Middle-of-the-road management: (medium results/medium people) this is a compromise and, like all compromises, it is characterised as much by what the manager gives up as by what they put in. A little attention to task and a bit of concern for people sounds like balance but it also reflects a level of impoverishment - not much concern for either. After Mouton’s death, Blake continued to refine the model, adding two additional styles:

Opportunistic management: these managers are highly opportunistic and are prepared to exploit any situation and manipulate their people to do so. 

Paternalistic management: these managers represent a flip-flopping between accommodating ‘country club management’ and dictatorial ‘produce-or-perish management’.

Blanchard’s ABCD Trust ModelTM sets out four elements of trust that are critical to creating and sustaining productive and trustful relationships:

• Able: demonstrate competence.

• Believable: act with integrity.

• Connected: care about others.

• Dependable: maintain reliability.

The term bottleneck describes the top of the bottle that limits the flow of what comes out. In other terms, a bottleneck is short-term overload of a resource limiting flow.

This could be machine availability, human resources, tool failure, shortages. A bottleneck can be fixed.