Problems with meeting deadlines can be frustrating for even the most skilled teams.

I’ve been working this week with a manufacturing team, exploring opportunities to improve their chances of delivering on time, in full.

On-time in-full (OTIF) is a supply chain metric that refers to a supplier’s ability to deliver a product when it’s been promised and at full quantities ordered.

Achieving OTIF is not always easy.

This company makes big machines - £500k a pop - with hundreds of parts delivered by multiple suppliers and build times of 1000 hours. Getting all the parts on time is tricky, and you can only order them when you know you need them - they’re too expensive to order on spec and have them sitting around in a warehouse.

We were tasked together to identify the problems that were causing delays, and come up with ideas to solve them. We spent a morning thoroughly exploring the workings of the factory, pinpointing bottlenecks and root causes. We viewed problems from different perspectives.

It helped that I had read the book “The Goal” several years back, so I could quickly identify the common challenges and characteristics.

The team decided they needed a better planning system to manage everything, that would enable them to forecast and allocate resources when and where they were needed. They also needed to build flexibility into the system so they could react when needed.

It quickly became clear that this was a big idea. Big in the sense that the team would need buy-in and cooperation from multiple other departments. They would also need help from senior leaders to sponsor the project and empower them to make significant asks of these other departments.

We talked about the team’s internal brand, and how it would be important to build this to exert influence to get the cooperation they needed. They needed to build trust with other teams and be clear in their communication and rationale. This internal brand would be important to gain trust and confidence from senior leaders and stakeholders.

I work on this a lot with teams, and have a specific workshop called Team Brand Upgrade. To get the best success as a team, it’s not just about how you work together but about how you also work with those outside your team to achieve shared success.

We worked on these ideas for the rest of the workshop. We built out the projects in detail, with actions for a 3 month sprint, plus milestones, mechanisms for accountability and regular check ins. We worked on messaging to communicate the planning system project, being clear on the objectives and impact, making it compelling to gain buy-in.

At the end of the session it was clear that the group were excited about both big ideas. They were on less familiar ground with the team branding project, but could clearly see its benefits and importance.

I look forward to checking in with them again in a few months to celebrate their progress.