Top 5 Challenges For Manufacturing Supervisors: #5 Proposals
The effectiveness of a Manufacturing supervisor has a major impact on the success of a business. At a shift-level, department-level, plant-level and a company-level, how a supervisor performs affects business results. Whether it’s safety, quality, service, or bottom-line earnings, they have a hand in the outcome.
How are they doing for you?
Among our plant supervisors, I see some consistent patterns that represent performance shortfalls. All manufacturing supervisors face similar challenges but unless they are trained and coached how to overcome these challenges, performance shortfalls may not be their fault. It's probable that your supervisors give you great daily effort, but possibly lack the knowledge to overcome the leadership challenges they face. In this series of articles, I will count down and discuss the top five of these common challenges, from the least impactful to your business to the most impactful to your business. Explore these points for yourself and see how your supervisors stack-up against these challenges.
Top 5 Challenges: #5
5. BUSINESS PROPOSALS:
Gaining Traction to Overcome the Bigger Issues
Most often, we don’t consider making business proposals to be within the scope of a manufacturing supervisor’s role. That’s what managers do, right? Well, a common theme that I see in manufacturing plants is that when a project scope is larger than them, supervisors will complain about the resulting issues rather than propose a solution to the problem.
For example, when there is an unreliable production machine, one that is negatively affecting daily output, department employees will bring this issue up to the supervisor hoping for resolution, but then the escalation stops there. Supervisors often fail to establish a business case and present options to their managers. Instead, supervisors will complain about the situation to their peers. They simply don’t know how to tackle larger, more costly problems. Most of them haven’t been trained on how to do it.
Ideally, the supervisor would quantify the effect of the issue (i.e. lost productivity), convert that to dollars and make a proposal to rebuild that unreliable machine or replace it with a new one. The project may need capital investment, in which case the supervisor wouldn’t necessarily need to write the capital request, but what they could do is put together a top-level proposal and present their proposal to the appropriate decision makers. They just need to be trained in how to effectively make a quantifiable business case.
Every supervisor who has more than two years of shop floor leadership experience should be trained on making effective business proposals. This training would provide them with the knowledge and skills to address larger scope issues.
Tools for the Trenches (T4T) offers a training session on this topic: CML408: How to Make Effective Business Proposals. This training session is one session of ten sessions in a course called Concepts in Manufacturing Leadership (CML) - Level 400.
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