ABSTRACT
Rob sat back and looked at the control charts. They showed the day-to-day variation in all the key control points for the carbon plant and the potroom. And now that included maintenance. The surprising thought was that it had only been nine months since his plan had first been formulated. Now there were process owners for each of these control points: operators, maintainers, pot controllers, superintendents. Monitoring wasn’t dependent on him, or on the IT department, or on other people not connected with producing the product. The signals in the charts were reported, investigated, and responded to by the process owners, without managers like Rob having to find out something by accident and ask what was happening. Of course, these process owners still needed help from Steve, the process superintendent, and his team once they did identify a trend or a spike or other pattern in one of the charts.
