How mature is your plant really? An honest self-test

A plant manager's gut feeling is not stupid. It rests on years of experience. But it has three systematic errors.

First, it sees what is visible. Boards, markings, tidy workstations stand out. Whether the boards are read, whether the standards are lived, whether order clarification in the office sits for three days, you do not see on a walk through the hall.

Second, it compares with yesterday. A plant that was chaotic five years ago and is orderly today feels far along. Measured against what the competition can do or what the customer expects, it may be at the beginning.

Third, it belongs to one person. What the plant manager considers mature, the shift leader sees differently. Both have reasons. As long as the perspectives are not laid side by side, it remains an argument about who is right.

A maturity check fixes all three errors: it examines behaviour instead of what is visible, it measures against a fixed scale instead of the past, and it makes the different perspectives visible instead of declaring one of them the truth.

There are many models. Most work similarly: they break the organisation down into assessment fields and rate each on a scale from beginner to exemplary. I work with seven fields, separately for shopfloor and office, because the two worlds are almost always at different stages:

• Governance and leadership: is there clear responsibility for improvement? Does leadership visibly stand behind it, or only on paper?
• Strategy and goals: does the line know the plant's annual goals? Are they broken down to the board?
• Lean methods: which tools have been introduced, and are they lived or only filled in?
• Process management: are core processes described, do they have owners, are deviations dealt with?
• People and competence: who can guide improvement? What happens if that person leaves?
• Measurability: are there KPIs that trigger behaviour, or only reports that get sent out?
• IT and data: does information flow, or is it retyped? Where are the Excel islands?

What matters is not the list, but the question behind each field: what really happens when nobody is looking? A plant that updates its boards only for the audit visit has a low maturity level in the lean methods field, no matter how many boards are up.

The method is the smaller part. The bigger part is how you secure honesty. In my experience that takes four things.

Several perspectives. I never ask only plant management. Shift leaders, clerical staff, maintenance technicians, purchasing rate the same fields. The differences between the answers are often the most valuable finding. If leadership rates a field high and the line rates it low, you know where the conversation has to begin.

Evidence instead of opinion. Every rating has to be anchored in something that can be shown. "We have standards" is not enough. Show me the standard, show me who last changed it, and show me what happens when someone deviates from it.

A view from outside. Not because outsiders are cleverer, but because they are not blinkered by routine and have no past to defend. The outside view asks the questions nobody asks internally any more.

No consequences for honesty. If a low score in the production manager's area is read as his failure, next time you only get high scores. The maturity check is a tool for learning, not for judging people. The executive team has to say that beforehand and keep to it afterwards.

In the plants I have supported, the same patterns keep appearing by which organisations rate themselves better than they are:

• Counting tools instead of effect: "We have introduced 5S, kanban, SMED and A3." Introduced does not mean lived.
• Taking the pilot area as the plant: the showcase line is mature. The other lines and the whole office are assumed to be too, although they were never touched.
• Confusing programmes with results: the big lean programme was expensive and long. So it must have achieved something.
• Building on people: the lean manager is outstanding. The plant is only as long as he is there.
• Ignoring the office: lean counts as a matter for the hall. That order clarification takes longer than manufacturing does not appear in the self-assessment.

A plant with several manufacturing areas had rated itself high in almost all fields. On the walk with the shift leaders it turned out: the standards on the lines came from the programme of years ago, nobody had touched them since, and the action lists on the boards had been unchanged for months. Leadership was not dishonest. It simply had not looked for a long time.

The maturity check is worthless if it ends in a presentation. Its purpose is to find the two to three fields in which the biggest lever lies, and to deliberately leave everything else alone.

A simple picture helps: current and target per assessment field side by side, as a radar chart. The target is not "exemplary everywhere". The target follows from the plant's strategy. Whoever wants to win on delivery performance in the coming years needs maturity in process management and measurability, not in every tool of the lean catalogue.

From the gap between current and target comes the roadmap. Few value drivers, one owner each, one KPI each, and a cut list with what you will stop. The cut list is often the more important part. Plants that do too much at once arrive nowhere.

And then: measure again after an appropriate time. Not to improve a number, but to see whether behaviour has changed. The second check is more honest than the first, because everyone knows what is being asked, and because the organisation has learned that low scores carry no punishment.

Before you set up a full check, you can do a short exercise in the next leadership meeting. Each person rates the seven fields for shopfloor and office alone, on a slip of paper, on a scale from beginner to exemplary. Then you lay the slips side by side.

Three questions on that: where are the ratings furthest apart? Which field has nobody rated high? And for each field rated high: what could we show a visitor tomorrow morning that proves this rating?

You will be surprised how quickly the exercise turns into an honest conversation. And in half an hour you will have learned more about your plant than from the last quarterly report.