Manufacturing Glossary of Terms

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.

Brainstorming is a technique used to generate ideas in problem solving, FMEA, and SMED, where no idea or suggestion is bad. The only rule is to respect each other.

Buffers can be described as inventory that is used to balance the differences in ‘takt time’ between processes.

Noel Burch, an employee with Gordon Training International, developed the Conscious Competence Ladder in the 1970s. 

The model highlights two factors that affect our thinking as we learn a new skill: consciousness (awareness) and skill level (competence).

Unconsciously incompetent/unskilled: we don’t know that we don’t have this skill or that we need to learn it (you don’t know what you don’t know). 

Consciously incompetent/unskilled: we know that we don’t have this skill (you know that you don’t know). 

Consciously competent/skilled: we know that we have this skill (you know that you know).

Unconsciously competent/skilled: we don’t know that we have this skill but we don’t focus on it because it’s so easy (you don’t know that you know - this is mastery).

The fundamental purpose of any business is to deliver results and create value for the customer, whether through service or products.

Catchball is an effective method/process for gathering, discussing, prioritising, decision making and agreeing SMART objectives and opportunities for improvement. It:

• Provides a format for people to share and discuss ideas.

• Engages people at all levels of the organisation.

• Increases collaboration, support and ownership.

• Ensures alignment throughout the organisation.