A642.2.3.RB -
Organizing for Innovation
Reflect on how your
organization organizes around innovation.
What formal and
informal processes exist?
At Boeing in general, there are too many formal and informal
processes to really analyze in one paper! However, in my organization within an organization, supply chain, we have a few formal process and informal process I can look at
here.
Formal:
Procurement Orders (PO): We have a very formal process for creating and
releasing demand for a part per PO. We have to make sure that the part is a Boeing
approved part, it has to be on an active contract, and it has to have a
connection to an airplane (Like a line # or non-conformance record.). If the
part request doesn’t meet this criteria we reject it and ask for more
information. This usually involves getting engineering to come up with an
alternative solution.
Formal:
Visiting a supplier: We don’t just decide to go and visit a supplier because we
have nothing better to do. We do regular visits to talk about performance and
quality, this requires official notification and a formal plan of action which
we share with the supplier. We have the same process for each supplier so that
we are comparing them all evenly and have a better idea of their overall performance
and possible process improvements.
Formal:
Accepting gifts or gratuity from suppliers: We have a very strict set of rules
around accepting any kinds of gifts from suppliers. This also falls into our
ethics rules. They vary by country but in general, we just don’t unless it is
considered a cultural desecration.
Informal:
We usually notify the material management folks when we place a PO that is
super-hot or a management-watch item. We’ll give them a heads up on any kind of
anomaly as well. It’s an informal process that helps another organization so it
makes for better relations between us.
Informal:
We don’t place POs or release parts that we down manage. Everyone supports a
specific commodity and supplier. Sometimes a supplier can support different
commodities. We will reach out to the “owning” analyst to work with them before
just picking from their inventory. It’s good communication.
Informal:
We all work to certain performance metrics but our managers all have a 7:30am
meeting on shortages so we all just know to work those things first. It’s not a
rule – but it sure helps our managers which means they won’t come around later panicked
about something that turns out to be nothing.
How effective are
they?
I would say
that our informal and formal processes are fairly effective. Most of the people
use them and the informal and formal alike gets passed down through standard
and tribal knowledge. As long as people think about who their actions impact
(warehouses, other analysts, suppliers) then these processes are effective. I
think these processes are both in constant evolution because our organization
is so big, even just the supply chain, that it takes a while for the
information to spread. We also have some “old timers” in the materials
management world who are not afraid of sending an email in all caps to let us
and all of our managers know when we mess up.
What else can be done
to leverage the effectiveness of the innovation process?
I firmly
believe that it has to start with building a culture of collaboration. You can
have Bob and Frank being all innovative in a little lab all day long but when
they come out of the lab to implement the innovation, they have no input from
anyone else and their innovation will either fail because it isn’t the right
fix or will not be accepted simply because no one besides Bob and Frank have
any ownership over it.
Furthermore,
if you pull in a bunch of the right people – people from all impacted groups –
to come up with an innovative solution it doesn’t mean success either. If these
people have not come from a culture of collaboration and coordination, there
will just be a bunch of individuals in a room with individual agendas.
A culture
of collaboration must be established through the entire organization in order
to leverage the effectiveness of the innovation process.
Why is usefulness
such an important part of innovation?
To be
useful, every new idea must become part of an existing web of ideas and people.
Human systems shape the way that ideas are accepted, used or rejected.
(McKeown, 2014) This is the first real mention of how important usefulness is
to innovation in our text. Usefulness of an innovation is as important as
collaboration – and I think even stems from collaboration. If a group of people
are collaborating to find an innovative solution to a problem, it has to be
useful to the people who will be implementing the solution.
In our
factory, leadership wanted to cross-train people so that they could be used in
other areas of the factory in order to balance the work load. People in the
pre-join areas of the build had one day where only three of the seven people
had actual work on the jet. All seven people were eventually cross-trained to
help in the part of the build that included attaching the landing gear. This
helped reduce the flow of that position by an entire shift which enabled them
to help bring more work back into their area to speed up the overall build. The
solution was useful on several levels. Cross-training people to help in other
areas when their areas were slow helped speed up the entire process. It also
created back-ups for some of the labor loss issues.
List 3 examples of
innovation that did not work.
In general,
I’ve been a part of many projects that did not last past implementation. But I have
also been part of projects that are still in use. The difference was all in how
useful they were to the people in the factory. A senior manager wanted to have big
cubes made of whiteboards that would have the daily tasks and metrics along
with any notices or whatever – an all-in-one bulletin board of sorts. Our
Moonshine shop built about 20 of these gigantic cubes (they were roughly four
feet wide x four sides, and about 6ft tall) at a huge cost, and rolled out to
the different work stations. The kicker was that these cubes were to be
maintained by the employees and reported out to the leadership – for the
leadership’s information. None of the employees who filled this out every day
actually used the cubes. These cubes came from a Lean idea and pushed out by
one senior manager who thought it was a brilliant idea. The cubes were only
useful to him. Once he left, we helped the factory break down the cubes and we
rolled back out the real time electronic TV screens that they actually used.
The examples
of the innovations that didn’t work in my organization all have stories like
the one above. The idea was pushed from leadership and thrust upon the
employees as this amazing innovative approach to flow management and parts
accountability. Other examples include a set of colored blocks we were supposed
to use to assign pallets of raw material to the machine they belonged to when I
worked in tooling. We color-coded the machine, and then the blocks. The blocks
also had numbers on them so the operator could tell what pallet to work next on
their machine. This wasn’t a complete failure but when the shop’s work load
reduced to very few pallets, I stopped using the process because it didn’t
matter anymore. It wasn’t useful. The way the machine shop worked changed and
the blocks didn’t make sense anymore. My manager (who had also come up with the
blocks when he was an industrial engineer) insisted I use the blocks regardless
and even put my lack of use of the blocks on my performance review. Needless to
say, once that manager left to another group – the blocks disappeared. They
were not useful anymore.
I also know
that we have innovations in our personal lives that don’t always work out. A
few years ago, my husband was looking for a way to make his truck more fuel
efficient and he read about an innovative solution that was a kind of
hydro-powered device that you build and then put in your vehicle’s engine (or
something like that) and it will be more fuel efficient. He bought the kit and
proceeded to obsessively build this thing again and again for about two weeks.
When he was finally done, he placed it in the engine (or something like that)
and it worked for about 15 minutes before the water in it evaporated and the
case cracked. That innovative solution became an interesting conversational
piece that sat on the mantel like so many other knick-knacks.
Another
example (and one I just couldn’t help but add to this list) is probably the
weirdest thing I saw on the many lists out there on Google (I remember the New
Coke debacle and Crystal Pepsi – but this was new to me): Gerber Singles for
adults. (With flavors like Beef Burgundy and Mediterranean Vegetables) It was
released in 1974 and was basically baby food for grown-ups. This innovative
take on portable food seemed like a legit idea until people realized that they’d
rather not have their steak have the texture of…well…baby food. [C]onsumers
showed they’d clearly rather spend a few more minutes preparing food they had
to chew than scoop unsavory-looking mush into their faces from a jar.
(CBInsights, 2017)
While these
last two examples weren’t part of my organization, the story is the same. When
something isn’t useful or meaningful – or just plain doesn’t work – it has to get
put on a shelf as a learning moment. I think failed innovations are also the
doorway to the successful ones. We have to understand what doesn’t work just as
much as we need to understand what does.
References:
Canfield. J. & Smith, G. (2011). Imagine: Ideation
skills for improvement and innovation today. Holland, MI: Black Lake Press.
CBInsights. (2017). When corporate innovation goes bad — the
110 biggest product failures of all time. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/corporate-innovation-product-fails/
Eadicicco, L., Peckham, M., Pullen, J.P., and Fitzpatrick,
A. (2017). The 20 most successful technology failures of all time. http://time.com/4704250/most-successful-technology-tech-failures-gadgets-flops-bombs-fails/
McKeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas
and execution for outstanding results. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, United Kingdom.
Pearson Education Limited.
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