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Vol 27 - No 02 - April 2001 Best-in-Class: Flexibility and Responsiveness in a Fast Moving Business Branch news Ins) Company visits Org) Computer Associates Org) EMI Music intro) On the 20th February, IOM London and Thames Valley Branches were treated to an excellent evening lecture hosted by Computer Associates at their Slough premises. .. The invited speaker was Alan McElroy, Senior Manufacturing Director, EMI Music who talked to us about EMI's management of its manufacturing activities in the UK and, in particular, his own approach to the manufacture of music CDs. Alan started off with some thoughts on the issue of benchmarking. Even though EMI has an ongoing programme of best-in-class performance improvement projects running through the manufacturing organisation he professed not to be able to explain what best-in-class really means. If we consider benchmarking, to establish an agreed best-in-class level, it is in practice very difficult to get a true understanding of the term. First of all, what is the 'class?' What should a business benchmark against, its direct competitors or the best industrial performers? If measured against the best in industry, then sector differences and different market demands make it very difficult to establish what the relevance of specific performance factors really are. If measured against competitors there is the difficulty of getting competitive data in sufficient detail to be able to assess benchmark performance. Also, there is the problem that striving for best-in-class performance against competitors' performance will always lead to second class performance since competitors will no doubt improve their performance at the same time. In other words, the benchmark keeps moving and usually moves upwards. Alan therefore suggested that customer demands must drive performance, explained by his business objective, ie. "To deliver 100% of customer demand at the agreed service levels, quality and cost ……… and stay in business!!". There have been dramatic performance improvements at EMI over the last few years. In particular the average lead time of manufacture has decreased by nearly 90% (!) and productivity has improved at the same time by 30%. Whilst the speaker did not expand on this point the audience did note that customer service and responsiveness are clearly of paramount importance since the improvement in lead time greatly outshines the - still very useful - improvement in productivity. The business improvement activities very much address the business issues which were described by Alan as: Alan also made the point that demand for newly released CDs is extremely hard to forecast since so much depends on the response of the consumer after the CD has been released. Especially for major releases, where the demand is huge, the ability for manufacturing to respond instantly is paramount. Alan's response to these market demands is 'simple': Alan took the audience through these items, explaining EMI's view on each one, what are the benefits and how do you achieve it, ie. what are tools and techniques used by EMI to deliver the objectives. The key message was, there is little magic in achieving best-in-class performance. It is largely the use of sound management techniques and regard for detail and consistency. An enthusiastic question time completed a highly entertaining evening where the IOM audience got a rare view of the thinking of a senior business man in what is arguably the most difficult manufacturing environment in terms of quality, agility and responsiveness. The eyes of a number of listeners where opened to manufacturing challenges which most of us can hardly comprehend, never mind respond to. The lecture was followed by the London Branch AGM where the following were elected: Related Topics:
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