Are The Parts Of Your Business Fully Aligned?

Your business is a series of pieces and parts that work together to produce a result. Some pieces are called people and others are called processes.

I can always equate business to manufacturing. Business to me is about manufacturing customers and profits. Take a look at the video below. This is the type of stuff that I did as a job everyday for years. We used to call the workplace “the robot factory”. I digress…

Anyway back to business. My very first project was to spray the back of the Pontic Sunbird with 5 strokes of clear paint. I mean how hard could it be?

Sounded like a piece of cake until I got there. Here’s what happen…

I get to the job site. I have my plans to execute this project in hand. After a week of waiting, I finally get time with the robot and get to programming. Lo and behold, I can’t reach across the whole trunk. I figure that I must be doing something wrong. So I just keep trying to get this robot to paint. I tried to get it to work for 3 hours.

Imagine this situation I am stressing out trying to get this robot to paint this car. The other engineers are looking at me like I am crazy. Because I am getting to the point where I am trying to “stretch steel”. Finally, I give up thinking that I just can’t program a robot. I made a critical mistake.

What didn’t I check first?

I did not check to see if the robot was in the right place.  A simple tape measure would have saved me tons of grief.

The robot was 7 inches out of place. And I did not know it because I assumed that the robot was in the proper place. So let’s look at this. No matter how hard I tried. How good of a programmer I was. How well planned the job was. How much I wanted it to work. The process would not work with the configuration that was there. So what I thought, did not matter. Not matter what, the fact was the robot was in the wrong place.

After this “misplacement” was discovered, the robot was re-positioned. And, the process worked perfectly. 30 minutes to completion.

The Business Application

Could it be that there is a part of your business that is just a bit out of place? And if you moved it or changed it a little bit your process would work as planned? The question is – are you willing to look objectively and change your business if you find something (or someone) out of place?

As you can see, I have never forgotten this experience because it taught me so much.

I learned a few important lessons…

1. Check and look yourself. Assume nothing. It doesn’t hurt to make sure that things are in order.
2. The best plans don’t always work.
3. Some stuff can’t be fixed.
4. Don’t get so focused on the little picture that you forget that nothing happens in a vacuum.

Best Regards,

– David Bullock

PS: Here’s a crazy video of things “NOT” to do with a robot. I used to program these things for a living and I would not trust my life to this machine. Do not try this at home. But then again, most people do not have robots in their garage. Enjoy…