THE HIDDEN COST OF TOLERANCE: WHY MANUFACTURING EXCELLENCE REQUIRES UNCOMFORTABLE DECISIONS
BY JOE GLEAVE, OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, COOLKIT
Most manufacturers talk about operational excellence as if it’ s a destination- a certification achieved, a system implemented, a target hit.
This fundamentally misunderstands what excellence demands.
Real operational transformation isn’ t about adding processes on top of existing foundations. It’ s about acknowledging when those foundations cannot support the weight of ambition and having the conviction to rebuild them entirely.
The danger of reliance
Manufacturing has a quiet addiction: dependence on systemic, tacit knowledge that is difficult to pass on and develop the rest of the team’ s capabilities.
The operator who knows exactly how to coax performance from a temperamental machine. The supervisor whose mental map of workflow bottlenecks exists nowhere else. The unwritten rules that keep production moving.
This feels like competence, but it is fragility dressed up as expertise. When your operation runs on unspoken knowledge, you’ re operating a daily negotiation with chaos.
Every absence becomes a crisis. Every scale-up attempt reveals new points of failure. You cannot replicate what you cannot articulate, and you cannot improve what you cannot measure.
The uncomfortable truth is that moving from craftbased to process-based manufacturing requires making explicit what has always been implicit.
It means telling experienced people that their hardwon knowledge needs to be captured, standardised, and – yes- made replaceable.
Start at the beginning
Here’ s what nobody tells you about culture change- we all wish it started with inspiration, but in truth, it begins with boundary-setting.
You cannot build a high-performance culture when the previous culture tolerated everything. The first task is definition.
What is acceptable? What isn’ t? At what point does repeated underperformance become a disciplinary matter rather than a coaching opportunity?
46 AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING