What Ever Happened to Lead Times?

If you’re going to “lead” in anything – and this is particularly true with engineering or manufacturing – you must have time.  Time for basic creative work, time to review, seek concensus – (or at least, expert opinions) and explore the important “what ifs.”

Far from being the “fat” of a project, lead time is, in a real sense, a project’s most critical component.  Without it, there can be no “best available” answer.  Without it, no customer obtains the best value.

Yet, somewhere, in the deep space between JIT and Concurrent Engineering, lead time became industry’s four-letter world.  Maybe it was because greater controls on funding lengthened the program approval process, squeezing the interval between approval and completion date.   Staff reductions, particularly those that hit purchasing departments, also contributed.  Topping it all off was an explosion in niche marketing and fast turnaround.  Suddenly it seemed that all situations should mirror the corner supermarket, with instant availability of whatever-you-need, 24 hours a day.(“No waiting!”)

I think something else came into play, too.  As more and more of us spent a larger portion of our workday interfacing with computers (more “instant response”), expectations began to change.  We became collectively impatient with “gray areas,” intolerant of ambiguity.  And more demanding than ever that we wanted what we wanted and we wanted it now.

Ironically, there are more computers in use by engineers and design people than by any other group.  And those computers indisputably make tasks less time-consuming.  But they don’t replace engineering.  And, in all but the most basic examples, they don’t negate the need for lead times.

Only engineers can do that.

And we do!Every times we stand by and watch lead time for a job shrink from six weeks to four, then three, and work overtime and way-overtime to accommodate the other dates the customer can’t change, we fuel the fire.  And reinforce the ideas that “lead time” really is expendable.

And it really isn’t.  The “luxury of time” is an oxymoron.Compressed schedules cost, in terms of quality and safety – and money.  Field labor at $100/hr. is ridiculous, even if it is during shut-down.  Extensive overtime works logarithmically to diminish productivity; as Lee Iacocca wrote, you can only sprint so long.  And frankly, people are human: they tend, not always consciously, to pace to a certain workload per shift.

Time “saving” techniques such as Concurrent Engineering sound as if they offer a good solution; our experience suggests that Concurrent Engineering is an expensive idea with very little to recommend it.  Mostly, it builds a lot of cost into a job.  And makes the entire industry less efficient – not more so.  To cite one specific, on a recent job which was concurrently engineered, the customer purchased raw material on three separate occasions.  I’m hesitant to every say how much money was simply wasted – and that’s not counting the time spent on bids, approvals and all the rest.

After a point, you can’t solve all problems by simply allocating more dollars, no matter how much talent you have on-board.  There’s a limit to what people can achieve while maintaining high quality.  And, if there’s an accident or hiccup or structural problem that really needs to consume some of the “slack” in the program, it won’t be there.

There are things we can do to make projects run more smoothly.Creative folks that we are, we can establish pull-ahead areas where preparatory work can be performed out of the way of production.  We can learn and implement the best techniques for managing complex schedules.  We can invest in the best CAD upgrades and other tools that can trim time where time should be trimmed.  We can request – plead – for incremental information.

As we write this, it’s early June.  Plans for automotive shut-down are not yet finalized, and that’s not unusual, or, in itself, problematical.  The problem is “someone” knows things that we should know now to better serve them.  And whether the obstacle to this information is paperwork or politics or purchasing, it isn’t in the customers’ best interests to keep this information secret.

If this year is typical, we will take on jobs for July shut-down as late as June 30.  That is what our valued customers need us to do.  We only want them to recognize that costs, and time, and complications, would all diminish if only they’d bring us into the loop sooner.  So we’d have the lead time – that word again! – to plan and to allocate people in the way that’s most favorable to them, most economical for both of us, least risky for all parties involved.

Lead time lets us all be “lean” without sacrificing the quality – the “best available” answers that we all seek.

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R.J. CYR CO., INC.
Windsor, Ontario Canada
www.rjcyr.com

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