Overcoming a Performance Plateau

Transforming into a Lean Leader


That is the undeniable what. Phil McIntyre, Managing Director of Client Development and Marketing for Performance Solutions by Milliken, explains, “Truly world-class leaders continually search for the best how. ‘How are we going to do this successfully? What is the best way to achieve our expectations?’  Even the best companies struggle with this, and they’ll struggle with it at the top of the organization. Once Leadership has consensus on the ‘how,’ then it’s just a matter of maintaining that commitment and continually communicating that vision to the organization.”

“Performance Solutions by Milliken shows the leaders who we work with not only the strategy but the tactics, too, for having conversations about what a performance system looks like,” says McIntyre. “It’s important for leaders to have that clear understanding, so they can deliver a consistent message of ‘what’ and ‘how,’ which leads to the third question: Why? To engage and motivate an organization – and to capture the hearts, not only the minds – leaders need to explain ‘why’ they’re going to do it.”

Beau Groover, Director of Performance Excellence with RockTenn (WestRock), says, “RockTenn was not much different from most companies in how it previously established goals. We would look at where we were performing currently in a particular measure and then say, ‘How do we improve that by 5 percent, how do we improve that by 3 percent?’ And that would determine how we framed up our resources, capital, and people.”

RockTenn (WestRock) is a leading producer of corrugated and consumer packaging and recycling solutions; and one of several companies that Performance Solutions by Milliken has helped adopt their version of the Milliken Performance System (MPS).

Enhance your Performance System

RockTenn Logo


Groover notes that the Performance Solutions approach is heavily weighted on the front end to how an organization puts in the Performance System, and, on the back end, weighted to the actual performance it gets from the system. “We get so wrapped up in the results that we fail to look at the process,” he points out. Groover uses a baseball analogy: how well a team conducts batting and fielding practice will usually parallel with how well the team performs in a game. In manufacturing, it means focusing on the processes that yield an output target, such as OEE, rather than how to just move the metric.

“Through the Milliken process, we’re trying to get our plants thinking about OEE as an output mechanism,” says Groover. “How well we run the equipment, how well we train our associates, how well we take care of our equipment, how well we prepare our inventory — all of that leads to the result. And the result is a high OEE number, which is what we want.” In approximately one year, the process work at RockTenn began to move the organization across never before seen thresholds of performance, reports Groover.  This is yielding double-digit improvements in speed, OEE, and reliability.  “We’ve uncovered or created capacity equivalent to 3 full sites worth, capacity that we didn’t even know was achievable.  The financial impact of that goes far beyond the P/L and starts impacting decisions such as capital investment and footprint rationalizations.”

“It’s a different way of thinking about where your problems are and where your opportunities lie.  We can become very accepting of our reality, of what we see. We start just accepting things, instead of challenging them to say, ‘Why does it work like that, or why do we have that failure, or why do we have that downtime?’ The Performance System takes all that emotion and acceptance out of it, and it makes it a data question: ‘Here’s where you’re performing. Here’s where you’re losing dollars. What are you going to do about it?’”

Performance Solutions by Milliken