Does your company have strategic initiatives in place to exceed customer expectations or improve quality? If yes, then these initiatives need to be translated into daily production and operations goals and communicated to your entire team. Using visual goal boards and organizing tier team meetings are proven ways to engage your team and achieve these goals.

 

Steer the Ship with Dynamic Goal Boards
Goal boards give everyone on your team a real-time snapshot of the performance of each production line and the company. These boards provide easy-to-understand information broken out by the time of day. Each production area should have a goal board placed so that everyone can see it from their workspace, and the operational goal board should be placed in a central area visible to all employees. Team leads and operators will update the goal boards with the necessary production data at regular intervals throughout the shift, according to an agreed-upon process.

 

Time-based Studies and Process Lay the Foundation
To create goal boards, you’ll need to gather the necessary data and implement processes for data collection, storage, and reporting. If you don’t currently track production data, you’ll need to start collecting it regularly throughout the shift. Scrap and rework data should also be tracked in conjunction with goal boards. This information provides the baseline to establish the goals and develop the visual boards. You may also need to gather safety and more general data to create operational boards.

 

Organize Mandatory Daily Tier Team Meetings
Communication must go both ways in an organization. Daily tier team meetings help engage all levels of employees with company goals and progress. In these meetings, the team shares current production goals and discusses what needs to happen to get the work completed, including addressing any issues that may impact production. Tier team meetings are also a place for the team to share process improvement ideas.

 

Tips for Organizing Tier Team Meetings
How you choose to structure your team meeting will depend on the size of the team.

- Tier team meetings should be held in front of the operational boards for all levels because one supervisor might be responsible for several different areas and different goal boards.

- The previous day’s production numbers should be summarized on the operational board and discussed.

- Quality, safety, shipping and scrap data, or process improvement ideas may also be presented.

- Depending on team size there may be multiple supervisor and operator meetings going on at the same time in other areas.

- Tier team meetings conclude with one meeting of the leadership team.

- Backups should be assigned to anyone responsible for leading parts of the meeting or reporting during the meeting.

 

Partner with Arizona MEP to Get Started
Arizona MEP helps manufacturers across the state get their facilities to run more efficiently and effectively. Our manufacturing experts can assess your operations and help develop the goals and processes you need to implement and sustain goal boards and tier team meetings throughout your company. Take action today by contacting AZ MEP at (602) 845-1256, email [email protected], or visit us at www.azmep.org.