3 Mechanisms and Use of Mechanism as an Operational Lever

The Corporate Angle

Ms. Shireesha Venkataraman Team Manager Amazon Development Centre

Mechanisms and Use of Mechanism as an Operational Lever

At Amazon, this is a widely used term and we concept that was introduced by Japanese in the believe what our CEO has said “Often, when we Toyota Production system. Here, increase of find a recurring problem, something that happens production resulted in the increase of defects which over and over again, we pull the team together, ask could have been overlooked by the Floor them to try harder, do better –essentially, we ask for supervisor. The mechanism of the Andon cord, good intentions. This rarely works... When you are when pulled by the assembly line halts the asking for good intentions, you are not asking for a production immediately and verifies the defect. change... because people already had good This mechanism was further developed into the intentions. But if good intentions don’t work, what continuous development or what we know as does? Mechanisms work.” Kaizen now.

As an organization or your scale of team grows, a A mechanism can therefore be defined as: lot of work occurs outside of leaders’ direct line-ofsight. The number and complexity of decisions • Parts that moved together to perform a increases, as do the challenges of communicating function or an outcome. and coordinating among the parts of the • A method fundamentally used to receive a organization. As the amount of data and decisions certain desired output by a set of inputs. that demand attention increases, attention itself becomes an ever more constrained resource. In other words, as you can see from the image Leaders use mechanisms to guide the organization above, mechanisms are cyclical processes until a beyond their direct line-of-sight, and to allow their set of desired output is achieved with a set of inputs. influence to persist over time. As simply put, a parent teacher meeting in a particular cadence is used as a mechanism by As a best example, I can think of Andon Cord as a schools to derive required student’s results.

• Weekly, Monthly and Yearly reviews Let us look at how to build an effective mechanism with a very simple and a relatable example/output we want to achieve: minimum of 75%. Tool: Choose the medium with which the output needs to be driven. It is always suggested to use the tool user friendly and very simple. As per our

students responding to the roll call or are the Similarly, in organizations: number of heads on the call vs online attendance • Andon Cord Mechanism on Production Inspection: This is one of the important steps floor usually that is missed in the cycle. To set a cadence • Kaizen improvement processes and revisit the delta with output and input. As per our example, quarterly or half-yearly attendance How to build effective Mechanisms? percentage is shared.

It is often said that the efficiency of a mechanism is Post inspection step, we also perform an additional measured when it runs as smoothly as it did in the action called ‘Course Correction’ if the delta is high absence of Line of sight of the leader. and make alterations to the tool adoption

Output: The attendance to class should be a

tracker numbers match? mechanisms. example, we usually see attendance registers/online As simple as it may sound, bigger organizations use attendance trackers are used as a tool. mechanisms for setting up levers like Monthly, Quarterly business reviews, press releases, Adoption: This step is to ensure that users of the performance and quality metrics for smoother tool are making optimum utilization. Are the operations.