The “plant within a plant” (PWP)

Nestes tempos de incerteza em que o middle-market traiçoeiro está a aumentar as suas fronteiras, as fronteiras de retornos financeiros medíocres, julgo que faz todo o sentido regressar aos clássicos e procurar paralelismos entre o que se vive hoje e o que se viveu no passado.
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Assim, recomendo vivamente a leitura do artigo de Wickham Skinner "The Focused Factory" publicado originalmente na revista Harvard Business Review em Maio de 1974.
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O artigo pode ser acedido aqui.
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Um trecho sobre como caminhar para a fábrica focada e dedicada:
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“In my experience, manufacturing managers are generally astounded at the internal inconsistencies and compromises they discover once they put the concept of focused manufacturing to work in analyzing their own plants.
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Then, when they begin to discern what the company strategy and market situation are implicitly demanding and to compare these implicit demands with what they have been trying to achieve, many submerged conflicts surface.
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Finally, when they ask themselves what a certain element of the structure or of the manufacturing policy was designed to maximize, the built-in cross-purposes become apparent.
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At the risk of seeming to take a cookbook approach to an inevitably complex set of issues, let me offer a recipe for the focused factory based on an actual but disguised example of an industrial manufacturing company which attempted to adapt its operations to this concept.
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Consider this four-step approach of, say, the WXY Company, a producer of mechanical equipment:
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1. Develop an explicit, brief statement of corporate objectives and strategy. The statement should cover the next three to five years, and it should have the substantial involvement of top management, including marketing, finance, and control executives.
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In its statement, the top management of the WXY Company agreed to the following:
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“Our corporate objective is directed toward increasing market share during the next five years via a strategy of (1) tailoring our product to individual customer needs, (2) offering advanced and special product features at a modest price increment, and (3) gaining competitive advantage via rapid product development and service orientation to customers of all sizes.” (esta abordagem de certa forma faz a empres voltar aos seus tempos de arranque em que tinha poucos clientes e poucos produtos e, por isso, era extremamente enfocada no essencial, a empresa não tinha recursos para desperdiçar em floreados)
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2. Translate the objectives-and-strategy statement into “what this means to manufacturing.” What must the factory do especially well in order to carry out and support this corporate strategy? What is going to be the most difficult task it will face? If the manufacturing function is not sharp and capable, where is the company most likely to fail? It may fail in any one of the elements of the production structure, but it will probably do so in a combination of some of them.
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3. Make a careful examination of each element of the production system. How is it now set up, organized, focused, and manned? What is it now especially good at? How must it be changed to implement the key manufacturing task?
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4. Reorganize the elements of structure to produce a congruent focus. This reorganization focuses on the ability to do those limited things well which are of utmost importance to the accomplishment of the manufacturing task.
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The reader may perceive a disturbing implication of the focused plant concept—namely, that it seems to call for major investments in new plants, new equipment, and new tooling, in order to break down the present complexity.
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For example, if the company is currently involved in five different products, technologies, markets, or volumes, does it need five plants, five sets of equipment, five processes, five technologies, and five organizational structures? The answer is probably yes. But the practical solution need not involve selling the big multipurpose facility and decentralizing into five small facilities.
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In fact, the few companies that have adopted the focused plant concept have approached the solution quite differently. There is no need to build five plants, which would involve unnecessary investment and overhead expenses.
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The more practical approach is the “plant within a plant” (PWP) notion in which the existing facility is divided both organizationally and physically into, in this case, five PWPs. Each PWP has its own facilities in which it can concentrate on its particular manufacturing task, using its own work-force management approaches, production control, organization structure, and so forth. Quality and volume levels are not mixed; worker training and incentives have a clear focus; and engineering of processes, equipment, and materials handling are specialized as needed.
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Each PWP gains experience readily by focusing and concentrating every element of its work on those limited essential objectives which constitute its manufacturing task. Since a manufacturing task is an offspring of a corporate strategy and marketing program, it is susceptible to either gradual or sweeping change. The PWP approach makes it easier to perform realignment of essential operations and system elements over time as the task changes.”