What is Daily Management?

Daily Management is concerned with completing ‘a day’s work in a day’.  To be successful managing day to day we need to manage the following;

1. work demand must be clearly understood which generates the plan.
2. The plan has to be appropriately resourced with people, equipment, materials and information.
3. Performance against the plan must be clear in real time.
4. Finally the reason for any performance gap must be known.

Daily management is about meeting ‘budgeted’ performance.  It is not about meeting ‘stretch’, we use Policy Deployment for stretch.Effective leaders develop behaviours that support the people that carry out day to day work, in a way that helps them understand more about their process, performance and problem solving.For many this could be considered as common sense, however this is not always common so a process is required for effective Daily Management.How do we implement it?Activities and features that combine to form a Daily Management process would include the following;

• Activities that teams carry out to set standards
• Activities that managers undertake and are linked to the standards
• An escalation process
• Simple identification of problems

Supporting Activities for teamsEffective Daily Management requires clear standards to be in place, so that deviation from the ‘norm’ is obvious.  Techniques that help here include:

• 5S
• Standardised Work
• Visual Management
• Daily stand up review of performance using a PDCA approach
• Problem Solving and countermeasure thinking / continuous improvement

Supporting activities for managersThe managers should also demonstrate certain activities in support of good daily management.

• Leaders walking the floor
• Teaching the Socratic way – with questions. Coaching
• Layered audits, (sometimes referred to as kamishibai)
• Lead by example

These are the essential skills and behaviours for leaders to display. N.B. The top 3 are skills the bottom one is behaviour.The escalation processA key part of the daily management routine is having a clearly defined escalation process so everyone knows what to do when abnormal conditions are identified. The infinity loop provides us with the fundamentals of this process.Normal working is made up of a combination of two cycles; sustaining and improving; together called the infinity loop or the ‘figure of 8’ model.The hand-off from Loop 1, to Loop 2 is the first opportunity to consider escalation.  This could be at a daily team meeting.  It would be handed over at the plant level daily meeting.Decisions will be made based on severity, skills, capacity, and shown at the plant Obeya.Simple questions to identify problemsIs normal condition defined? Checks 5C/S, visuals, standards etc.Are there gaps between target and actual?Do we know where we are in real time?Was current standard work followed? Do we have it, is it current, do we use it? Why the gaps?How well do we understand the process?How will we close the gaps fully (P-D-C-A)? No ‘sticking plaster’ solutions, although containment may be required before root cause etc.?When can we review success and learning?Set expectations, if time scales are long this may also lead to escalation. Actions should also be on the visual management as ‘Rapid PDCA cycles’What are the benefits?Daily Management is used to achieve all three of the goals of TPM:

1. Zero accidents
2. Zero defects
3. Zero breakdowns

It achieves this over time by bringing the best out of people, to pull together and meet the daily demands on the business. Daily Management will give:

• Control
• Structure
• Clear processes
• Defined roles and responsibilities.

These all simplify the work routine. Industry Forum’s Team Leader Essentials training covers daily management in detail. Find out more