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Organisations should be structured differently to be able to respond quickly in a low-volume environment with customized products. According to QRM, it is important to change from a functional to a cellular structure.
Typical
office activities include request for quotations (RFQ) processing, order
processing and new product design and development. There are several
departments involved in these processes, such as sales, customer service,
engineering, purchasing, scheduling and so on.
Although these operations might take half of the total lead time, accounts for a quarter or more of the total costs and impacts the overall market share, not rarely these office operations are neglected as improvement opportunities in companies.
In addition, look at the Response Time Spiral by Rajan Suri (source: R. Suri, It’s About Time, 2010). This spiral shows why long lead times result in even longer lead times.
In the traditional structure of office operations, we see a lot of departments. Many functional departments in the office operations result in lots of handoffs to process each job. Besides, different orders go through the departments differently.
In order to reduce the lead time, it is necessary to break down functional walls and create a team that can process jobs through multiple functional steps. This cellular organisation might look like the figure below.
You see different functions from different departments are combined into cells and therefore less handoffs take place. A typical result of an office operation is an quotation to the customer or a production order, including all information needed to fabricate the product.
Quick Response Office Cell (Q-ROC) is a multifunctional, cross-trained team located in close proximity, dedicated to all office activities that belong to a FTMS or product family, with ownership of all operations and commitment to lead time reduction. Different functions are combined in the cell and the team should both have the experience and authority to complete the processing of jobs entering the Q-ROC.
Team members should be provided with expertise via cross-training. As included within the definition, team members should be physically located together in one area. Eventually, cells are created which are as independent as possible in relation to other cells. But the team members have a shared responsibility which makes them dependent of each other.
It is important to overcome some typical challenges. First, There should be enough support from top management. Therefore, also top management should be educated on the main principles of QRM. Then, Teamwork, cross-functionality and ownership cannot compensate for insufficient capacity. So, capacity should be planned properly. Finally, measuring the success of the Q-ROC should be time-based, not efficiency based.