January 30, 2010
The best never rest
It takes passion and drive to achieve continuous systems improvement
By: Tom Gegax
Improvements can come in many areas, such as these customer-friendly viewing windows.
Success has many fathers, as the saying goes. One sire to my company’s exponential growth (the Tires Plus stores) was our obsession with improving the way we did things. We were fanatical about identifying roadblocks, unearthing errors, and fine-tuning our system. Part of our campaign included benchmarking the highfliers; and one way we did that was an occasional intel-gathering field trip.
Once, we chartered a twin-prop plane for our regional managers, my right-hand man Wayne Shimer and me to investigate a top national tire chain’s Omaha locations. The company had a great reputation and did a lot of things right — and they were about to invade the Twin Cities, our most lucrative market.
We split into three teams, rented cars, and went shopping. We got oil changes at every store and watched their MO.
“While we waited,” Wayne recalled, “I’d say to the manager, ‘That looks like a great computer system. How does it work?’ And he’d explain the whole thing in detail.”
We flew home fat with improvements that we immediately clicked into place, like installing windows between the bays and the lobby so customers could watch the progress on their cars.
“Looking back,” Wayne said, “the cost and the time to load us all onto a charter and fly us back and forth to Omaha, I mean, that’s crazy. Or is it? It takes a lot of passion and drive to be the best.”
The big boys tend to pursue structural precision through a process called Lean Enterprise, a hybrid of TQM (Total Quality Management) and JIT (Just In Time).
Essentially, Lean Enterprise integrates quality commitment, waste elimination and employee involvement within a structured management system. Its primary purpose is to perform all functions — from product development and production to sales and customer service — so that steps that don’t create value for the end user are eliminated. This allows steps that do create value to flow unimpeded in the value stream.
Clearly, Lean Enterprise demands a thorough understanding of customer needs, as does Six Sigma, a rigorous, empirical method of eliminating defects in all systems. Six Sigma, conceived by the late Bill Smith, a reliability engineer at Motorola, defines a defect as anything outside of customer specifications. General Electric claims that Six Sigma produced $10 billion in benefits in just five years.
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