Over the last several years, Forstar Aircraft Engines has renewed its overall commitment to quality, speed, and cost-effectiveness in order to maintain its status as a financial and technological leader in the industry. As the industry has become more competitive, and the advantage enjoyed by Forstar has decreased, there has been an emphasis from management on three quality improvement goals:
Improving product quality
Improving design and manufacturing speed
Reducing losses from the shop floors
The losses -- associated with the scrap, rework, and repair of poorly designed or poorly machined parts -- have cost Forstar too much over the years, both financially and in strained relations between Design and Manufacturing. All too often, these two departments at Forstar argue over the blame for losses in front of the MRB (Materials Review Board). Such encounters have not helped to improve relations.
Recently, however, there have been signs that change may be coming. For one thing, Forstar's President proclaimed in a speech last month that many American companies "will no doubt soon move to parallel operations." Forstar still develops and improves parts "in series." This means that each part passes from Design to Manufacturing, and then to various finishing operations.
Changing over to parallel operations would mean that Design and Manufacturing would have to work together more to interactively evaluate the performance and design of a part as it is developed. Such a change would be no small matter for Forstar to undertake, especially in light of the strained relations between Design and Manufacturing. Nonetheless, many managers at Forstar took the president's speech, which was published internally in Forstar's monthly newsletter, as a sign that Forstar might be preparing for a major leap to parallel operations in some of its new plants.
Another signal came last month when the Vice President of Design Engineering approached the Vice President of Manufacturing Production, suggesting that they convene a team of managers to develop a plan for how the two departments might work together to meet the three quality improvement goals. They asked managers from Design, Manufacturing, Sourcing, and Quality to choose one section manager each to attend a meeting to discuss implementing a cooperative "Common Measures" program.
The four section managers that were chosen are:
L. Wilkins Design Engineering
H. Ansel Manufacturing Production
L. Berenson Continuous Quality Improvement
T. Donahue - Sourcing
These four have been asked to meet with D. Holloway, a special consultant from Manufacturing (with previous experience in both Quality and Design). The group of five has been tasked with agreeing on a plan that will move Forstar toward its three quality improvement goals, and improve relations between departments.
The four issues that the group must resolve are the following:
How will the Common Measures team be managed?
Where will the money come from to fund Common Measures?
How will the results of the program be measured?
What time commitment will the managers make to the Common Measures project?
If they can reach general agreement on these four issues, then Common Measures teams will be set up for each Forstar division (e.g. - airfoils) using today's team as a model.
General agreement means that only four out of five people present need to agree on all four issues, though unanimous agreement would send a more powerful message to management.
If general agreement is not reached, the VP's will likely go ahead themselves and make a declsion on how to implement Common Measures, without the benefit of the team's recommendation. Today's meeting may well represent the section managers' only chance to affect senior management's thinking before it acts.
What advice would you give to five other people about to play this game for the first time with regard to the process they might use to generate agreement on all four issues on the table? What other process steps could you have taken during the negotiations to ensure a satisfactory outcome from the standpoint of the character you were playing while maintaining relationships (and build trust)? (250 words)
Did the participants in your group attempt to form either winning or blocking coalitions, or both? How effective were these attempts? Given that only four out of the five parties needed to be included in an agreement, what strategy could a party about to be left out of an agreement use to convince the others not to reach agreement without them? (200 words)
