Strategic Excellence in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industries

8Establishing a Direction

8.1 INTRODUCTION

In Chart 8.1a, we see an example of a table that was designed by the engineering department and then “thrown over the wall” for manufacturing to produce. This organization was siloed, and the engineers would never soil themselves by walking out into the production area or communicating with production employees.

A meeting was held to remove some of the silos and get departments to work more closely together. The company leadership discovered that there was a lot of waste generated in departments, like production, trying to work around the designs created by engineering who seemed to have no idea of the pain that they were causing. One of the topics of discussion was the table. Production asked engineering ...