All Posts Tagged With: "Best Practices"
Really Fast Food
Pal's Sudden Service
Pal’s Sudden Service is one of my favorite Baldrige stories. The only restaurant to receive the Baldrige Award (2001), Pal’s is a small fast-food chain headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, that boasts world-class performance:
- Service speeds four times faster than its competitors
- Order accuracy at least ten times better than its closest competitor
- Employee turnover half the industry average
- Customers who come back 3-4 times per week compared to 3-4 times per month for its competitors
- Same store sales and market share that have grown for the past 24 years
A great article on SunHerald.com traces the evolution of Pal’s from a single store selling 12-cent mini-hamburgers to a beacon for best practices. The company formed Pal’s Business Excellence Institute (BEI) in 2000 to share its operational ideas with other organizations and a bunch have jumped at the chance, including hospitals, school systems, law firms, charities, churches, and more than 50 nonprofits and government agencies. Ken Schiller, head of a barbeque restaurant in Texas, brings his management staff to BEI every year. “Coming to Pal’s allowed us to know where the bar can be set,” he said. “It gave us a benchmark that we otherwise wouldn’t have even known was possible.”
In the article, David McClaskey, who founded BEI with Pal’s, describes one of the keys to Pal’s operational excellence. “Pal’s has a standard,” he said. “They’re going to train 100 percent of their people to do the job 100 percent right,…
18Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Power of Process
Cargill Corn Milling (CCM) North America received a Baldrige site visit in October 2008, four months after the Cedar River crested at 20 feet above flood stage and caused an estimated $100 million in damage to its facilities.
It was ready. Despite having to remove and recondition 600 motors, 500 pumps, and more than 100 blowers, CCM was up and running in September and operating at full capacity in November—the same month it learned that it had received the Baldrige Award.
In “Watershed Moment” (Quality Progress, August 2009), CCM President Alan Willits credits his organization’s fast recovery to its process-oriented business culture. “We didn’t need to go back and ask how we were going to manage this project,” said Willits.” We had all the processes in place. We were simply able to use them to react to a very significant and difficult event.”
In the summary of its award-winning application, CCM describes how it uses its Best Practices Model to improve work processes. The model is a variation of Plan-Do-Check-Act or the DMAIC model that has four stages and nine steps:
- Plan: Identify opportunity / identify key measures / standardize measurement system / evaluate and identify best practices
- Evaluate: Document best practices / Implement best practices
- Analyze: Measure and communicate best practices / Audit best practice compliance
- Refine: Refine best practices
Through systematic deployment of its Best Practices Model, CCM achieved world-class results:
- Earnings after taxes tripled from 2003 to 2007
- CCM’s cost of doing business…
