High-performance and efficient teams cannot exist without good communication, yet horizontal communication channels to allow for teamwork and collaboration are generally deficient and ancillary to hierarchical communications, says process flow management consultancy StratFlow CEO Hendrik Lourens.

Business silos lead to company departments competing against one another for resources and management attention, which typically frustrates all the members involved and discourages cooperation and collaboration. In a highly centralised environment, support departments, such as logistics, maintenance and human resources, find it difficult to support production flow.

“If the organisational structure makes it difficult to act on operational requirements, the end result is a disengaged, poorly performing group of individuals who do the minimum required,” emphasises Lourens.

StratFlow establishes daily operations meetings initially led by a production flow expert. Representatives from all functional departments attend these meetings. The expert guides the meetings, steering conversation to operational issues and reinforcing horizontal communications, engagement and collaboration. Production flow charts, updated daily, are used to make the pattern of production flow visible for all departments.

This approach results in changes in the dialogue and behaviour between teams and departments, reinforcing supportive behaviour and weakening obstructive beha- viour and conflict.

“The goal is to improve production flow and return business’s attention to the daily operations, where it is possible to increase producti- vity. Efficiency measures for parts of the process – generally driven by the enterprise resource planning or accounting system – often decrease overall mining efficiencies because they destabilise the overall system.”

Rationalisation initiatives, like reducing inventory buffers and spare capacity, often cause interruption to flow and decrease productivity further.

Increasing the production flow throughout the operation is the only way to reduce the costs for every department; this debottlenecking is done without changing the workforce, processes or equipment in place, and aims only to ensure a constant stream through the bottleneck, explains Lourens.

“Interdependence and variability affecting daily operations do not show in enterprise resource planning systems, and are typically not considered by top-level decision-makers, but affect daily production. “However, once we show people the contradictions involved in managing their operations by maximising efficiency in every section, and how simple changes to the way they work improve results, they eagerly adopt the new way of working.”

Lourens notes that implementation of the production flow system requires an increase in buffers. This improves the flow of production, as issues do not propagate down the production line.

StratFlow’s production flow system supports the sustainability of a business by providing a way for leadership to support cross-functional teams that coordinate across functional departments, says Lourens.