OPIP. Another Acronym?

[Post by Chuck Krugh, January 17, 2025]

At BIW, we have no shortage of acronyms, and, yes, we have added another to the list: OPIP. So where did this one come from? Well, there is a story…

In early 2024, I was working with the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) to develop performance improvement plans. Dave Clark, Vice President of Operations and Planning, shared this process with his team, and they started calling their review the Operations Performance Improvement Plan. Somewhere around that time, I was talking with Brandon Glazier, Director of Manufacturing on Land Level (who reports to Dave), about his performance improvement plan, and he dubbed this process the “OPIP.” And as sometimes happens, it stuck. So be sure to thank Brandon for the new acronym, OPIP.

What is an OPIP? As the name would imply, it’s a plan that you build to make your business, department or process run more efficiently and for less cost. And to be clear, it is about how you operate your part of the business, whatever your responsibilities might be. All parts of the business can have an “operations” improvement plan, not just our manufacturing department, which we happen to call “Operations” here at BIW.

As business managers, we should strive to constantly find ways to improve how our business, department or process runs and performs.

The processes we use to measure our business performance – and subsequent improvements – all fall under the business operating system (BOS). And, as you recall, our BOS is built on the Plan-Do-Check-Act model, so having a plan to improve performance (the OPIP) is an essential part of implementing the BOS.

Even if you are not now at the stage in your career where you’re developing an OPIP, you are part of a team or organization that is using them, and you may be tasked with a responsibility to contribute to or implement a task in the OPIP, so it’s helpful to understand how they’re being used.

So, what goes into the OPIP?

As you know, companies exist to make money. One of the ways a company can make more money is by getting better at doing what the company does, in other words, doing what you do, just more efficiently. For us, building ships for fewer hours is how we measure gains in efficiency.

At the most basic level, the OPIP is a tool. The format of the OPIP allows us to capture, organize, schedule, prioritize and execute strategies that reduce the number of hours it takes to build our ships.

Let’s take each of these areas and break them down a little further.

As a manager, I have a lot to manage on a daily basis. I have to manage my own tasks, track the tasks of my subordinates, direct the short-, medium- and long-term projects of the company and monitor our financial condition; the list goes on… Managers at every level of our company have a lot to manage and keep organized so they don’t drop any of their assigned responsibilities.

Two critical parts of the battle to get organized are identifying all of the tasks that you need to manage and determining each task’s priority, which tells you what to tackle first. Some people use sticky notes or pads of paper, but those are easily misplaced and are one-dimensional. Enter the OPIP.

All of our OPIPs across the company are developed in the same format to make them easy to understand. We use a specific software tool called SmartSheets to manage the plans.

SmartSheets allows us to capture, organize, schedule and prioritize the OPIP. It is basically a scheduling tool that has more capability. This allows us to track and obtain a lot of information once we enter the initial data. It also helps us manage the updates.

But, just like in manufacturing, the tool is only as good as what we put into it.

Next week we’ll look at how SmartSheets can help accomplish our mission in improving our performance as a company.

See you on the deckplates!

Safely Execute High-Quality Work

Chuck
President, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works

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