Wainwright Industries manages by fact. One visit to Mission Control and you believe it.

Wainwright dedicates one conference room at its headquarters in St. Peters, Missouri, to displaying the information and analysis that drives its award-winning continuous improvement efforts. It calls the room Mission Control.

The walls display a plethora of charts and graphs, including trends for quality and performance indicators and, for each customer, monthly satisfaction index scores, trends for quality measures, stretch targets for exceeding customer expectations, and weekly customer feedback reports.

Wainwright developed five key strategic indicator categories from its strategic business planning process: safety, internal and external customer satisfaction, Six Sigma quality, and business performance. “We focus on safety first and making money last,” says plant manager Mike Simms. And the focus has paid off. “We went from $100,000 in Workers Compensation claims in 1991 to zero in 1994,” Simms said, “and our number of recordable accidents dropped from 66 to 12.” At the same time, putting business performance last did not mean it suffered. Over the same time period, Wainwright’s gross profit as a percent of sales jumped from 8.7% to 14.2%.

Mission Control displays key quality indicators for each of the five categories, all of which link to the company’s mission, vision, values, and objectives. The Mission Control indicators are recordable accidents, associate suggestion rate, internal and external customer satisfaction, internal parts per million, sales, and net income. Trends are updated and reviewed regularly. “I go into Mission Control every day,” said Don Wainwright, chairman and chief executive officer. “With a glance I can tell how all of our customers are doing, both internal and external.”

To keep the focus on serving its customers, the company created a flag system. If Wainwright is on track to meet its stretch goals for a customer, it hangs a green flag next to that customer’s satisfaction rating. It uses a red flag when potential problems could prevent it from achieving its goals. The appearance of a red flag leads to the formation of an action team that works with the customer to study the problem and implement a solution. Action teams are also formed when any customer satisfaction index score drops below 95%. At any given time, 95% of the flags in Mission Control are green.

Of course, the conference room still serves as a conference room. Wainwright conducts all in-house training, staff meetings, and presentations to customers and suppliers in the room, where they can’t help but soak up the myriad quality messages surrounding them.

Mission Control is one-stop shopping for those curious about the condition of the company and involved in improving it. It doesn’t replace having key indicators posted near those employees who can affect them, nor does it segregate quality from the rest of the organization. What it does is communicate the “big picture” in a powerful way.

(Excerpt from my book, Uncommon Sense, published by John Wiley & Sons in 1997)

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