| Traditional Belief |
QRM Principle |
| Everyone will have to work faster, harder and longer hours in order to get jobs done in less time. |
Find whole new ways of completing a job with the focus on minimizing lead-times. |
| To get jobs out fast, machines and people must keep busy all the time. |
Plan to operate at 80 percent or even 70 percent capacity on critical resources. |
| To reduce lead-times, efficiencies need to improve. |
Measure the reduction of lead-times, making this the main performance measure. |
| All departments and suppliers must place great importance on “on-time” delivery performance. |
Stay with measuring and rewarding reduction of lead-times. |
| Installing a material requirements planning (MRP) system will help reduce lead-times. |
Use MRP to plan and coordinate materials. Restructure the manufacturing organization into simpler product-orientated cells. Complement this with a new material control method that combines the best of push and pull strategies. |
| Negotiate quantity discounts with suppliers, since long lead-time items need to be ordered in large quantities. |
Motivate suppliers to implement QRM, resulting in smaller lots at lower cost, better quality and shorter lead-times. |
| Encourage customers to buy products in large quantities by offering price breaks and quantity discounts. |
Educate customers about QRM and negotiate a schedule of moving to smaller lots sized at reasonable prices. |
| Implement QRM by forming teams in each department. |
Cut through functional boundaries by forming a Quick Response Office Cell (QROC), a closed-loop, collocated, multi-functional, cross-trained team of people responsible for a family of products. Empower the QROC to make necessary decisions. |
| The reason for implementing QRM is to charge customers more for rush jobs. |
The reason for embarking on the QRM journey is that it leads to a truly lean company with a more secure future. |
| Implementing QRM will require large investments in technology. |
The biggest obstacle to QRM is not technology, but mind-set. Combat this through training. Next, engage in low-cost or no-cost lead-time reductions. Leave big-ticket technology solutions for a later stage. |
