All Posts Tagged With: "manufacturing"
The New Pro-Business Mentality
There are a lot of politicians hitting the airwaves with their “pro-business” mantra that usually includes reducing regulations, eliminating the minimum wage, and cutting corporate taxes. But, as Seth Godin so eloquently points out, what may have been pro-business in the past has little to do with what is best for business in the 21st century. (“What does ‘pro-business’ mean?” Seth Godin’s Blog, October 13, 2010)
That old-school pro-business mindset is more like pro-factory, but factories in the U.S. business world represent a fraction of all the business that’s being done, especially since so many factory jobs have been sent overseas. “It turns out that factory thinking is part of a race to the bottom,” writes Godin, “to be the cheapest, the easiest place to pollute, the workforce that will take what it can get.”
Godin offers a new set of pro-business strategies that sound like a much better fit for business today:
- “Investing in training the workforce to solve interesting problems so they can work at just about any job.
- Maintaining infrastructure, safety, and civil rights so we can create a community where talented people and the entrepreneurs who hire them (two groups that can live wherever they choose) would choose to live there.
- Rewarding and celebrating the scientific process that leads to scalable breakthroughs, productivity, and a stable path to the future.
- Spending community (our) money on services and infrastructure that help successful organizations and families thrive.”
This is not a Chamber…
14Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBest Practice People Management
Last year, Deloitte, The Manufacturing Institute, and Oracle surveyed U.S. manufacturers about their people management practices, which included asking them to identify the key drivers of their future business success. The most profitable of the largest 142 companies in the survey shared three best practices that differentiated them from the least profitable companies:
- They defined a clear and explicit people strategy linked to their business strategy.
- They conducted formal succession planning across the workforce.
- They linked employee pay directly with the productivity of the company or the manufacturing plant.
(from “People Management Practices and Profitability in Manufacturing” by Richard Kleinert, Emily Stover DeRocco, Atanu Chaudhuri, and Robert Maciejewski, IndustryWeek, October 11, 2010)
The Baldrige Criteria address all three best practices with questions about:
- Human resource plans that support your strategic objectives and action plans. The IndustryWeek article notes that, “In many organizations, the HR function does not participate in the strategy development process nor does it have complete visibility into corporate or business unit strategies.” That won’t fly at a Baldrige organization.
- Managing effective career progression for the entire workforce. Organizations that integrate Baldrige develop what the articles calls “a long-term talent management strategy” that looks “beyond the C-suite to prioritize succession of all critical positions based on specific organizational needs and strategic direction.”
- Aligning compensation and incentives with the success of the organization. According to Deloitte’s 2010 Top Five Total Rewards Survey, “66% of respondents plan to make changes in the design of compensation…
Ready to Go Big
The results speak for themselves:
- Same store sales have grown for 24 years
- Market share has grown for 24 years
- Service speeds four times faster than competitors
- Order accuracy at least ten times better than the closest competitor
- Employee turnover half the industry average
Pal’s Sudden Service has accomplished all of this with what may be the ugliest store design in fast-food history—and it may be coming to a major thoroughfare near you. Pal’s was recently named one of Restaurant Business magazine’s “Future 50,” which are restaurant chains that have proven their concepts, are fast growing, and are getting ready to go big.
Pal’s key concept is a management system based on the Baldrige model. The restaurant chain won the Baldrige Award in 2001. It established the Business Excellence Institute to share its best practices with other organizations, and those lessons aren’t just for food service companies. More than 50 nonprofit organizations and government agencies have taken the training BEI offers, which once again demonstrates the universality of Baldrige principles. You can learn more about Pal’s BEI by clicking here.
Pal’s did its first Baldrige assessment in 1995. As I’ve seen with other organizations, the first assessment often produces profound insights, and the same was true for Pal’s. “From the founding of this company until 1995 we didn’t know what business we were in,” said Thom Crosby, the CEO at Pal’s. “We took it for granted that we were in a service industry. When…
29Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSmall Wonder
Stoner expects every one of its employees to be a leader. Before starting their jobs, new employees complete two weeks of orientation that includes shadowing every job in the company—including that of the president. They can do all that in two weeks because Stoner only has 45 employees.
Located in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, Stoner makes specialized cleaners, lubricants, and coatings, primarily for car care. In 2003, it became the smallest company to win the Baldrige Award.
“We first learned about Baldrige in 1991 through the local Lancaster County program,” said Rob Ecklin, Jr., Stoner’s president. “We started to familiarize ourselves with the criteria then.” Stoner became the first company in the county to win the award in 1995. A few years later it submitted its first Baldrige application.
“We like to learn, to challenge ourselves and to be challenged,” said Ecklin. “Only a small percentage of companies truly want to improve. We’re one of them. We get excited about performance excellence. This is not a sexy business. It’s not high tech. Not flashy. But we’ve been able to get extraordinary results from ordinary people.”
Stoner gets these results by expecting every employee to be a leader. It involves all employees in setting the direction for the company. It uses teams to flatten the organization and push accountability to the front lines. It reinforces accountability by giving every employee the authority to spend up to $1,000, without supervisor approval, to resolve…
24Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued83 Vie for 2010 Baldrige Award
The Baldrige program reported yesterday that 83 organizations have applied for the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The breakdown of applicant categories is 54 in health care, 10 in education, 7 in nonprofit/government, 7 small businesses, 3 manufacturers, and 2 service companies.
As the graph shows, last year the health care category accounted for 60% of all applicants. This year it represents 65%. While health care is embracing the Baldrige model, businesses are snubbing it: Only 14.5% of the applicants came from the three business categories, down from 15.7% last year. The Baldrige program came into existence to make American businesses more competitive. While it got business leaders’ attention during its first decade, it has fallen off their radars over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine the Baldrige program could have survived if it had not added the health care category.
So what will it take to get business leaders to consider the Baldrige model? Or is the program’s inability to market its product too complete to overcome?
To read more about the Baldrige Award, click on these articles:
- What Is Baldrige?
- How the Baldrige Award Works
- Baldrige 101
- How to Integrate Baldrige
- Baldrige Gets Results
- A Baldrige Leader
- Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winning Applications
2009 Baldrige Award Winners Announced
Click on the organization to learn more.
Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, Kansas City, Missouri, in the manufacturing category. With 2,700 employees and an annual operating budget of $540 million, FM&T is a management and operating contractor at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Kansas City plant. Performance highlights include:
- Overall customer satisfaction at or above 95% for the last four years compared to a commercial best-in-class benchmark of 85%
- A Management Assurance System for identifying, implementing, measuring, and sustaining the “critical to quality” needs necessary for desired performance
- An Enterprise Alignment Process for daily accountability, aligned with FM&T’s balanced scorecard and strategic plan
- Cost savings of $23.5 million to $27 million annually for the past three fiscal years through the Six Sigma Plus Continuous Improvement Model
MidwayUSA, Columbia, Missouri, in the small business category. MidwayUSA has 243 full-time and 100 part-time employees and annual revenue of $185. It is a catalog/Internet-based retail merchant that offers shooting, reloading, gunsmithing, and hunting products. Performance highlights include:
- 1,500 documented processes, each focusing on the customer
- Overall customer loyalty of 94%
- Growth rate of 30% compared to 10% for its top competitor
- Strategic planning process that systematically aligns key processes to company goals, customer key requirements, and core competencies
AtlantiCare, Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, in the health care category. AtlanticCare is a nonprofit health system with 4,872 employees and $700 million in annual revenues. Performance highlights include:
- Ranked seventh out of 4,200 hospitals in 2006 by Commonwealth Fund for clinical results…
The Universality of the Baldrige Model
Any organization of any size or type can integrate the Baldrige model. It wasn’t always that way.
When the Baldrige program started, the Criteria reflected the quality movement in manufacturing. While service organizations could apply for the Award, few had similar experience with quality management. They had trouble relating the Criteria to their businesses. It took three years for the first service company, FedEx, to win the Award.
The Criteria evolved. With the feedback of experienced examiners, NIST made the Criteria more “user-friendly” for service companies and then, in the mid-90s, for small businesses. In this decade, the Criteria have become relevant for healthcare and education and then for nonprofits and government agencies.
Today, every organization can integrate the Baldrige model. Scan the lists of state award winners if you need evidence of that (click here to find their Web sites). And it’s not just every organization in the United States: International programs based on the Baldrige model demonstrate its universality (click here to find out more).
Every organization likes to think it’s unique—at some level, it is—but on the key factors that affect organizational performance, it doesn’t matter what you do. A manufacturer can learn how to improve strategic planning from a medical center. A school district can learn how to manage processes from a small business. A nonprofit can learn how to engage employees from a service company. It’s not even that big a stretch.
What makes this possible is…
5Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
