In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data

ABCM:  “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

In the movie Superman III, "Gus" Gorman’s (actor Richard Pryor) first job was in the computer department located in the basement of a corporation.  He was responsible for the company’s 500+ employee’s salary checks.  As he settled into the job, he discovered that when calculating salaries, the computer actually went out four decimal points, and then rounded to the two-digit cents amount.  Not wanting to be too greedy, Pryor programmed the computer to forward the fourth decimal digit amount into his personal savings account.  The first week, his savings account increased $85,789.25 (the computer always rounds to two-digit).  ABCM is the programming of that fourth digit.  It may not seem like a lot, but if you add those pennies up…

ABCM measures costs at each step of the process, enabling managers to quantify the tax levied by inefficiencies and delays.  ABCM focuses on specific details such as scrap or absenteeism that must be tied to a specific product or process.  Once defined, actual problems can be resolved and eliminated.

Many organizations still run on emotions and gut feelings that have never been tried or tested.  Eliminating the emotion and getting down to the root cause of the matter will take us more quickly to the problem resolution phase and on to the next area of opportunity.

In order to get this point across in our European plants, I had t-shirts made with the saying “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” emblazoned across the front.  The associates questioned the meaning on the t-shirts.  I explained to them the t-shirt was multi-purpose:

§         “In God We Trust” from the face of the US dollar

o    signified the monies we were recovering through our continuous cost savings efforts.

§         “All Others Bring Data”

o    focused on reducing the time between defining the root cause of the problem to implementing the resolution. (the old “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem” reiteration)

ABCM and performance measurements make it possible for us to immediately address the competitive endurance of the company versus focusing on the petty emotions that keep us from moving towards solution.  The shirts served as a daily ABC example that negative emotions (“it wasn’t me”) only wasted time, effort, and productivity.  The t-shirt was a constant visual (mindset change) reminder of the plant culture towards excellence (and, hence, individual contribution and team performance), not the non-value action of finger-pointing.

 

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