Overview o f SHEN

The new model groups its principles into 4 categories, each containing several inter­ related principles. The categories are intended to assist the company to track achievement based on related activity. In some cases, the grouping may also help the company to decide how to prioritise the changes needed in its improvement program.

As shown in Table 5.1, there are three principles for each category with the exception o f operations and capacity, which has five. The first few principles 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 contain most of the material relating to MTO companies that tends to be missing from previous WCM models in the literature.

The main objectives of the first category, “generate enquiries/sales”, are (a) to provide a quick response to customer enquiries (b) to translate customer enquiries into product specification and design, and (c) to make the necessary plans to ensure that operations can meet the customer’s goals. Under the second category, “operations and capacity”, the shop floor operation is organised to help ensure a steady flow o f materials. Activities include determining lead-time, set-up time, preventive maintenance, housekeeping and scheduling. The next category, “human resources”, refers to the improvement o f the company’s workforce and finally the fourth category o f the SHEN model, “general continuous improvement”, covers the aspects of quality and performance measures, benchmarking and marketing.

Table 5.1: SHEN cate2ories and principles

Category _{SHEN principles}

Generate enquiries/sales _{1. Integrate the functions ofproduction and marketing}

in all processes;

2. Design fo r products, processes and improved supplier relationships;

3. Collaborate with customers;

Operations and capacity 4. Simplify the shop floor;

5. Seek simple, flexible, movable, low-cost equipment in multiples;

6. Improve scheduling and workload control to cut flow times;

7. Cut the start up/ changeover time and improve preventive maintenance;

8. Improve information flow;

Human resources 9. Make rapid improvements in skills and flexibility; 10. Have systematic rewards, recognition and monetary

payment;

11. Everybody involved in change and strategic planning - to achieve a unified purpose;

General continuous improvement

12. Improve quality and implement appropriate performance measures;

13. Gather customer feedback and benchmarking; 14. Promote/market/sell every improvement.

Table 5.2 and Figure 5.1 summarises the relationship between the new model and the previous literature, showing which aspects of the model come directly or partially from Schonberger s (1996) model and which come from other parts o f the literature. It can be seen that there are only two principles that have a direct full link, for the most part it has been necessary to make adjustments in the emphasis or to add new material for the reasons given in chapter 4.

T able 5.2: The relationship between Schonberger (1996) and the SHEN model

1. Integrate the functions ofproduction and marketing in all processes- This is a new principle and not available in Schonberger (1996).

2. Design fo r products, processes and improved supplier relationships - This is a new principle but the issue of reducing the number o f suppliers from

Schonberger’s (1996) principle 5 is incorporated.

3. Collaborate with customers - This principle is new, though there has been a very minor influence from step 2 of Schonberger’s principle 1.

4. Simplify the shop floor - This is a new principle but the issue o f housekeeping from principle 14 in Schonberger s (1996) model is relevant.

5. Seek simple, flexible, movable, low-cost equipment in multiples — The title is similar to principle 15 in Schonberger (1996), but the 5 steps have all been redefined.

6. Improve scheduling and workload control to cut flow times— This is a new principle but the aim o f cutting flow times from Schonberger’s (1996) principle 6 is relevant, though the methods o f achieving this are totally different.

7. Cut the start up/ changeover time and improve preventive maintenance — Set up time reduction from Schonberger’s (1996) principle 6 and preventive maintenance from Schonberger’s (1996) principle 14 are relevant but the methods o f achieving them are different.

8. Improve information flow - This principle is related to principle 12 in Schonberger’s (1996) model. However, the idea to “fail-safe” the problems has been removed, and several o f the steps in the new principle are quite different to those in Schonberger’s (1996) principle 12.

9. Make rapid improvement in skills and flexibility - This principle uses some o f the ideas in Schonberger’s (1996) principle 8, but nearly all the steps are different.

10. Have systematic rewards, recognition and monetary payment - The title is slightly changed and the five steps are slightly modified from principle 9 in Schonberger (1996).

11. Everybody involved in change and strategic planning — to achieve a unified purpose — Ideas from principles 4 and 11 in Schonberger’s (1996) model have

been merged into this new principle.

12. Improve quality and implement appropriate performance measures- This principle uses some o f the ideas in Schonberger’s (1996) principles 10 and 13, but nearly all steps are different as less emphasis is given to the use o f the process capability index and the QSFV metrics.

13. Gather customer feedback and benchmarking - This principle is related to principle 2 in Schonberger’s (1996) model. Many of the issues are the same, although some of them are ranked differently. For example benchmarking is at step 5 rather than step 3.

14. Promote/market/sell every improvement- The title is maintained and the five steps are slightly modified from principle 16 in Schonberger (1996).

As discussed in Chapter 3, much of the material contained in Schonberger (1996) is a combination o f material from the literature on best practice, TQM, JIT and so on. However, this is not shown in Figure 5.1, nor covered in this chapter as these links are discussed in section 3.1.6 and summarised in Table 3.1.

It is also important to note that some of the principles that are described as applicable in Table 4.2 in Chapter 4 are not necessarily used in full in the new model. This was

thought to be appropriate in order to keep the number o f principles to a manageable number and to give an appropriate emphasis to each of the issues raised. Where it was felt to be appropriate to merge issues from two of Schonberger’s principles together, this was due to some overlap in the issues or their underlying concepts. The principles themselves are described in greater detail later in the chapter, but some justification for the merging o f issues is given below. Firstly, in principle 7 o f SHEN, the issues of set up time reduction and preventive maintenance are combined because it was felt that with greater expertise of preventive maintenance, shop floor workers will become more familiar with the machinery and tools, and therefore they should be able to search for mechanical ways to reduce the set up time further. O f course, this is only one aspect o f set up time reduction (Shingo (1988)), but this aspect leads to some overlap o f the two issues included in the new principle 7.

Secondly, in principle 11, Schonberger’s (1996) principles 4 and 11 are combined because it was thought to be appropriate to bring together the issues o f the involvement o f workers in strategic planning and of recording/owning process data at the workplace. The underlying concept of these two issues is to make use o f the employees’ expertise, treating them as a source of ideas rather than ju st machine operators. Thus the similarity in the underlying concept justifies the inclusion o f these issues under one principle heading. Thirdly, in principle 12 in the SHEN model, principles 10 and 13 are combined because the underlying issues on quality in principle 10 is also an important aspect of the performance measures in principle 13.

F ig u re 5 .1 : Th e d er iv a ti o n of th e SH E N m o d e l -S a.

Finally, with respect to principle 13 in SHEN, the issues of gathering customer feedback data and benchmarking are maintained in the same principle, as was the case in Schonberger s (1996) principle 2. This was thought to be acceptable because they are both considered to be external information which the company must collect. The first source o f external information is the customers’ feedback data, then the customer needs data, best practice data and finally benchmarking. It was believed that the first is the easiest, cheapest set of information to obtain whereas benchmarking is expected to take a considerable amount of time and/or to be more expensive.

Given the way in which the model is intended to be used, the way in which the issues are grouped into principles is not particularly crucial. The purpose o f using principles in the SHEN model is to make the issues easier to remember rather than providing improvement stages for exactly the same aspects of operations management. The use o f the steps within each principle is discussed further in the following section.