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Manufacturers are letting gaping inefficiencies in back office operations slide despite an obsession over shopfloor productivity, according to industry experts. The double standard is denting profitability and workforce morale, according to frontline factory managers and productivity gurus who attended WM's People & Productivity roundtable debate recently. Factory back offices were like country cousins to the finely tuned front-of-shop operations, claimed Mark Bown, global customer improvement manager at Cummins. "It's far behind because we've focused so much on the shopfloor, investing in new machinery and making it lean," he explained. "We mapped a value stream of our line and the product had a 35-week lead time yet it took a week to manufacture. There's a lot more opportunity for improvement than just pounding the shopfloor." But many opportunities were being missed due to the "us and them" culture at many sites, warned Mick Jones of medical equipment manufacturer Eschmann Equipment. "The ops department has spent many hours looking at lean manufacture yet the office staff will roll in 30 minutes late and go 10 minutes early. They're not part of our business; they're not part of lean." It's an industry-wide affliction, said Gregg Gordon, senior director of manufacturing practice at workforce management systems supplier Kronos. The trend can be traced to the ease with which you can measure shopfloor efficiency compared to an office environment, he explained. "I think this is par for the course. We have focused on the shopfloor because it's easy. The processes are fairly standardised, well understood and really well documented. The back office has processes that are not standard and less well understood." Those applying the same rigour to the back office could easily cut several weeks from lead times, Gordon added. Continue to turn a blind eye and you risk creating despondency and resentment among shopfloor workers, reported Simon Macpherson, senior director of business development and operations at Kronos. "If you want productivity, you want an engaged workforce. When the shopfloor sees areas or processes in the rest of the company that aren't being addressed, it really affects their morale." Consistency is key, agreed Lewis Denton, operations manager at currency manufacturer De La Rue. "I don't think you can run different rules," he explained, citing De La Rue's Gateshead plant where around a dozen finance and HR employees are monitored in the same way as over 300 shopfloor workers. "Those people are managed exactly the same, the same return-to-work interviews, monitoring and time keeping." Great divide Not all sites are as unambiguous, according to David Bacon, manufacturing industry manager at Kronos. "We were working with a company, which shall remain nameless, that had wall to wall Six Sigma on the shopfloor. But we looked at their design team and found they were taking 200 days per year in excess holidays across the team because there wasn't a proper process in place." However, some delegates claimed back office staff deserved to be treated differently. "Take your people responsible for innovation," said Nitin Patel, operations director at Glen Dimplex Home Appliances. "Are you going to put them in a system and stop them innovating? I've got designers who are worth a fortune if they design something. They might take three weeks off but I can't replace them. That's the real world." The philosophy polarised debate, with Bown of Cummins leading the riposte. "I don't agree that you should apply different rules for different people and allow them to take extra time off," he argued. Yet, factories were wrong to position themselves as democracies, responded Patel. He said: "The rules required for functions can be different, but they need to adhere to that. If that job requires five days extra, then that's the rule of engagement." Senior posts justified empowerment and trust that you just wouldn't expect of a factory floor worker, agreed Kay Rowlands, production controller for Veolia Water. "There have to be differences. If I've travelled to Singapore over a weekend, I think if I take a couple of hours one day to look after my son that's fine. I've worked my weekends time and time again travelling. Shopfloor staff don't do that: they clock in at 7.30am and clock out at 4.30pm." But the principle can be turned on its head. At Eschmann, senior staff who work beyond contracted hours now qualify for overtime after a new ERP system was installed which included the capability to report this, revealed Jones. "The financial director said hang on, if you're working more than 37 and a half hours, then you should be paid. I had to open the building on Sunday because five managers wanted to work," he said. Paid overtime for management is likely to be a step too far for most. However, smaller changes to bring offices back into line with the shopfloor can bring swift paybacks, said Ann Watson, MD at skills awarding body, EAL. "We haven't got a shopfloor so we had to apply lean techniques to what we had which was office-based and field staff." EAL found field staff being frustrated by paperwork rather than hitting the road to make sales. The organisation reviewed its systems and recouped 900 man hours of waste – the equivalent of three extra sales staff. "If you apply the principles to something other than the shopfloor, the returns can be really powerful." Engineers had a crucial part to play in leading the changes said Bob Tunks, owner of BK Tooling in Bishop's Stortford. "Surely it's the engineers who should be coming up with a system that works to cut out the admin? I have a tiny company with limited resources and yet we knew this and said we need to put things in place where people don't have to write things out or use drawings. We decided that was lost time." Very basic changes can yield spectacular gains concurred Bown, who recalled a 5S programme he rolled out in the offices of an aerospace manufacturer. "The biggest factor was removing out trays from people's desks," he explains. "People would leave work in a tray and wait for someone to come from reception twice a day to move it on. We got them to hand the documents to people." The change cut lead times by three weeks. However, not everyone was convinced. "Surely that's waste?" countered Patel of Glen Dimplex. "The engineer will be being paid more than the secretary to do that job." But workforce management expert Gregg Gordon backed Bown's approach. "You're getting a system-wide improvement. Lead time is reduced by three weeks because of the improvement in flow." Patel remained unconvinced. "I'm not sure," he mused. "That's the problem," quipped Bown. "Convincing people like you." The point neatly summed up the dilemma facing all management-driven productivity programmes, reflected Patel: "And that really is the problem, if you can't win people over, you're going to struggle." how to solve a problem like absenteeism WM's People & Productivity research (published in WM July) showed absenteeism down on previous years. We asked our delegates why: Lewis Denton, De La Rue: "It's down to better management. I was off with a broken leg, but I still went into work because they found something for me to do. I had guys in with broken arms... we find them something they can do even if it's just escorting people around the site." Mark Bown, Cummins: "I think if you make people redundant and use a selection process then you've often got the higher performing people left who possibly take less time off. Then, as you come out of recession, you've got new people who are more enthusiastic. We've got to be careful as the figures will probably look better for a period of time until people start to get comfortable." Max Gosney, WM: "How surprising is it that 10% of our survey respondents didn't know their absence levels?" Simon Macpherson, Kronos: "That's outrageous. But it doesn't surprise me. We go into a number of companies who have no clue or they think their absence level is fantastic and when you ask them how they capture it they say it's on honesty sheets. When we put a system in, it shoots up to 8% and they say it's worse now." Mick Jones, Eschmann Equipment: "One of the things we did with the appraisal system was if people had poor attendance records, we'd knock half a per cent off their pay rise. What was apparent was people on the shopfloor haven't got a clue how many days they take off sick. So we put in a system where I am notified of attendance figures. I sit down and say to them, 'Look, you've had this amount of time off'. That's made a big difference because people realise they can't throw a sickie and get away with it." factory v back office: quotes of the day "First of all we apply lean in the factory but all the way through the process the head that needs feeding has tended to stay the same size. We've got the same size sales force we had and the argument is if you stop knocking on doors you'll sell even less." Dave Shepherd, operations director, Building Adhesives "Nothing lowers morale on the shopfloor like seeing the back office get away with abusing the system." Simon Macpherson, Kronos "How many medium and larger companies have got someone in an office role and everything stops if that one person is not there to put their signature on something? You just wouldn't accept that on the shopfloor." Mark Bown, Cummins "I put together graphs of factory productivity and invited the management team to come down and view them. Not one director has actually been down to look at any one of them. That doesn't look good." Mick Jones, Eschmann Equipment "I've got designers who are worth a fortune if they design something. They might take three weeks off but I can't replace them. That's the real world." Nitin Patel, operations director, Glen Dimplex Home Appliances "I've worked my weekends time and time again travelling. Shopfloor staff don't do that: they clock in at 7.30am and clock out at 4.30pm." Kay Rowlands, production controller, Veolia Water