The Manufacturing Game®

Achieve Your Reliability Goals with The Manufacturing Game®

The Manufacturing Game®

Creating Reliable Performance

High maintenance costs and less than optimum equipment and process reliability are major concerns in today’s industrial facilities.

Implementation of programs to improve reliability are often short-lived and expensive. Employees don’t understand the programs, don’t see how they fit together, and don’t see how they relate to the work they do. The result is partially implemented programs that improve equipment reliability only at the expense of much higher maintenance costs.

With The Manufacturing Game®, we have proven that higher reliability can be attained while lowering both maintenance costs and operational losses by addressing the need for organizational change. Making a significant change in reliability and cost requires engaging everyone in the organization to work differently.

Our “high touch, high tech” learning laboratory is actually a 4′ x 5′ board game with 3 roles to play: Operations, Maintenance, and Business Services

Objective: Satisfy customer demand by producing and shipping the finished product without hurting people or the environment, returning a profit to the company.

Roles: Participants gain new perspectives by assuming a different role from the one they perform daily. Maintenance people become operations personnel; business services staff become mechanics; and operators become business services staff. Participants see how their decisions and actions impact each other and the overall performance of the plant.

Improvement through Defect Elimination: A defect elimination program tackles even the smallest, most annoying problems in a plant. By getting everyone involved in improving day-to-day work life and fixing errors and faults, it helps build a strong culture of continuous improvement. This shift in mindset gets more people on board with reliability efforts at all levels.

While the concept may seem simple, implementation can be much more challenging. The primary goal is straightforward: eliminate defects that cause downtime, production losses, and waste. However, the involvement of people introduces added complexity. The Manufacturing Game® workshops give everyone in the organization a chance to come together and focus on getting rid of defects.

Day 2: Taking Action

The second day of the workshop applies the lessons of the Game to the real world. Small, cross-functional teams (what we call Action Teams) are formed to give participants a way to apply the newly gained knowledge.

Each Action Team brainstorms potential defect elimination projects in their area of the site, selecting one that they will complete over the following 90 days. They develop a specific set of action items for accomplishing this and leave the workshop with a plan and the enthusiasm to get it done.

This real world activity puts the knowledge gained from the simulation experience immediately into practice, kicking off the defect elimination habit essential to transforming the organization. Successful Action Teams also provide the quick payback many companies require to move to world class operations.

Proven Results

The Manufacturing Game® Workshops launch the action necessary to make the strategies learned a reality, providing significant operating improvements within 90 days and substantial financial impact within a year. But the benefits go beyond the hard dollar savings of improvement activities; they also include a substantial impact on the culture of the organization. The workshops will build a shared vision, a shared language and the proactive culture required for significant and lasting change.

A Shared Vision

Creating the culture to become world class in reliability requires more than a few people with a new perspective and certainly more than just a single workshop for the leadership team. World class reliability requires hundreds of people doing thousands of little things correctly every day. Reliability is a team game, requiring everyone in the organization to do their part.

Our workshops are most effective when they are:

used with a majority of a site’s frontline personnel
combined with solid leadership support and communications
focused on the value of improved reliability rather than just reduction of maintenance costs