When capabilities go out of sync your investment in increasing organizational efficiencies might be at risk.
This thought struck me while traveling to Pune today. Our flight arrived at the Pune airport on time but the pilot announced that we have to wait for a few minutes since there was no parking slot in the airport. Now this might have happened either due to the inefficiencies of another airline which failed to take off on time or the inefficiencies in the airport itself. Let us for a moment forget that there could have been delays piled up due to fog and other natural phenomena. The net effect is that the airline which arrived on time was in danger of being penalised indirectly through further delays resulting in bad customer experience. The common assertion in such cases is that the airline suffered bad press for no fault of its own.
However, there could be more to it than meets the eye.
I remember a story narrated by my friend Ravi Talluri, a quality engineer in major US auto companies:Toyota ensures that its top most engineers visit their suppliers' plants and spend time on the shop floor watching the process for days together. They simply watch and observe; collect a lot of data and send out their brief to their own management. The reports are then handed over to the suppliers with detailed notes on areas of improvements.
Toyota spends a lot of time observing processes both in its factories and those of its suppliers. In fact, all it could have done was sign a SLA with the supplier and start rejecting defective components when delivered.
Instead what Toyota and many Japanese companies do is adopt a first-time-right principle. This helps in identifying the defects at the place where it is likely to occur and fix it right at the place of its origin. Its true that First-time-right ensures that both time and resoure is saved for the supplier but more imprtantly it also ensures that the suppliers' process is in sync with Toyota's own process. So Toyota's every penny spent on its capabilities is not only conserved but paid back handsomely.
Just as in a corporate production environment, in most public utility services it becomes the responsibility of the entire ecosystem to ensure capabilities are synchronised. This ensures an overall increase in efficiencies and experience.
However, sadly, the case in most systems in India is that invidividual companies in an ecosystem gloat. about being efficient -- such as in airlines industry. If one airline is super efficient and the rest of the ecosystem is faltering the overall customer experience will still be bad. In such cases every part of the ecosystem should sit together and agree to comply to a common capability achievement.
What do you think?
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