Congratulations to the Regional Eye Center, Kingsport, TN  for completing a custom workshop on Achieving World-Class Results July 25-26, 2010.

June 2010 Achieving World-Class Results Class

Congratulations to our most recent Pal’s BEI Alumni who completed the Achieving World-Class Results training on June 21-22, 2010.  The participants from left to right are Pal Barger (Pal’s Sudden Service), MayLing Hu-Lai (Edo Sushi Bar & Grill),  Heather Beckett (Four Seasons),  Michelle Webb (Four Seasons),  Erika Richmond (Marco’s Pizza),  Mark Scibiorski (Marco’s Pizza), David McClaskey (Pal’s BEI),  Thom Crosby (Pal’s Sudden Service),  Cody Pasco (Dairy Queen),  Clay Rolston (Pal’s BEI).

Thom addresses how IT is approached in the front-of-the- house as well as the back-of-the-house.   This Q&A session with Thom is a feature of Achieving World-Class Results training.

David McClaskey, President – Pal’s Business Excellence Institute,  states that “I have been very impressed with how K&N Management, a seven year client of Pal’s BEI,  has been able to take Pal’s world-class processes, adapt, and apply them to Rudy’s and Mighty Fine to create excellence.  It is not an accident that they are an outstanding role model for many of their practices”

Ken Schiller, co-owner of K&N Management, is featured on the opening video on Pal’s BEI website  homepage www.palsbei.com.

Title: How to Get and Keep Productive People: A Prestera Center Improvement Case StudyImplemented based on best practices learned from attending a session at the 2008 SAAS National Conference and NIATx Summit

Summary: The Prestera Center management attended the “How to Get and Keep Productive People” plenary session presented by Pal’s Business Excellence Institute at June 23-25, 2008 SAAS National Conference and NIATx Summit. Presented during the session were simple and world-class, highly effective processes for employee hiring, training, positive reinforcement, peer reviews, and upper management’s role in creating a culture of excellence related to HR practices. The Prestera Center management recognized that a lot of the principles noted by Pal’s BEI could be applied at Prestera to improve employee turnover, training, employee engagement, and productivity. On Oct. 1-2, 2008, seven top executives from Prestera attended a specially designed Pal’s BEI two-day HR workshop. From that workshop, 5 HR improvement projects were planned and implemented. These projects have had profound effect at changing the Prestera Center HR practices and culture resulting in improved results. This session will review both how this was done, share practices and implementation lessons that might be applicable to other organizations. Today there are over 50 Prestera Center locations scattered throughout the eight county region, making it the largest mental health and addictions services provider in the State of West Virginia. With nearly 700 employees, Prestera Center has ranked annually since 2003 in the top 100 employers in the State of West Virginia.

Speaker(s):Bob Hansen
Executive Director
Prestera Center for Mental Health Services, Inc

Dr. Deborah Harley
Assistant Professor
East Tennessee State University and Pal’s Business Excellence Institute

At Pal’s, we carefully design our products and services and continually analyze our delivery processes.  We have created a business model in which our bright and capable leaders and managers are on the front line directly interacting with customers and team members, driving results and being personally rewarded.

These and other measures ensure that our operations meet customer expectations each and every time a customer is served.   Standardization is a critical factor in achieving this.

To make process assessment quick and easy to perform and easy to teach, we have identified and used as many visually based quality standards as possible.  We encourage and expect all team members to self-manage and take responsibility for the overall performance of their positions.  As Pal’s, it is each and every team members responsibility to a pass to the next position or customer only products that fully meet 100% of the internal and customer requirements – NO EXCEPTIONS.  Pal’s training, process design and management systems combine to enable each team member to carry out this job responsibility and, therefore be in a state of self-control.  Thus each individual, without asking or involving a manager, can throw out a product or even shut down or slow down a process, assess and determine cause, and make adjustments to get the output to standard.

We constantly asses our processes, beliefs and results, looking for areas to improve.  When we find a high-value target for improvement, we use our robust SimpleExcellence® Problem Solving Process to reach and implement solutions and then share the learning company-wide.

Thom Crosby – taken from Restaurateur’s Insight Into Performance Excellence

“It’s always Christmas here,” says Reynolds, describing the AG plant in Greeneville, Tennessee. In fact, hourly associates work from seven to nine months out of the year in this seasonal plant, printing, converting, and packaging millions of rolls of Christmas wrapping paper annually! So how did the manufacturers of a product that makes gifts festive for people around the globe come to gather at a stage decorated with a NASCAR race theme? It began when several managers attended a workshop  called Accelerated Continuous Improvement (ACI) taught by Russell Justice, a specialist in applying quality management and positive behavioral principles in the workplace. Justice developed the 10-step process that he describes as the “fully blended mix of TQM methods and applied behavioral analysis,” an approach that was instrumental in earning Eastman Chemical, from which he has since retired, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. “This approach  is the best known method in the world today to accelerate improvement,” says Justice.

 Accelerating improvement was the goal of the first group of AG representatives who attended Justice’s workshop  at the PAL’s Business Excellence Institute in Kingsport, Tennessee. Pal’s Sudden Service, a quick service restaurant chain based in Kingsport, won the Malcolm Baldrige award in 2001, and as part of the award’s mandate to pass on excellent business practices, created the institute which has been attended by hundreds  of people (from organizations of all types,) who want to learn from the exemplars of business success.  Felts attended one of those early sessions and tried the 10-steps in his department: pinpointing an area for improvement, measuring, studying the processes, establishing a baseline, setting goals, creating an action plan, and providing feedback and reinforcement.  He admits that at first he bit off more than he could chew by starting too many projects at once. That’s when Justice asked him, “What’s keeping you up at night?” setting him on a path of simplification with the advice of never graphing something that involves using a calculator. Felts followed his lead. “It was phenomenal how the productivity in my department took off,” he said. “That was really when a lightbulb came on for me. You make performance visible on something that your crews have ownership of and relate to, give them feedback and positive reinforcement, and then you can almost stand back and watch!” 

Proponents like Felts saw the improvement that the process made in their individual areas but it wasn’t until Scott Crawford came on board as plant manager that the effort to apply the process to a plant-wide pinpoint took firm hold. Crawford, an admitted skeptic at first, agreed to attend an  ACI workshop  and emerged convinced that this was the way to run the facility, and eventually the other five U. S. AG plants. Today Crawford states, “We now have a workforce that I consider engaged and empowered. We listen to people a lot more now that hadn’t been listened to in the past. The facts speak for themselves.” 

The facts are that the entire plant aligned behind a goal of implementing process improvements that impacted the measure of feet of gift wrap  printed and converted (into smaller rolls and then packaged) for every dollar spent plant wide.

The cross-functional Step 10 Team (STT) selected the NASCAR theme because of the many regional fans of the sport. They also reasoned that the requirements of a winning driver matched those required of their team members: skill, speed, accuracy, innovation, safety, and teamwork. Individual departments discovered a carload of meaningful ways to link-in to the pinpoint of feet per dollar . Their data was then rolled into a plant-wide measure that was calculated and revealed every WINSday, a day when associates were encouraged to wear their official 200 Days of Racing T-shirts.  These T-shirts were earned by signing the racecar banner as an official crew member on kickoff day.  “We told our partners, vendors, and customers who came to the plant,

‘You’re a part of our success too and invited them to sign the banner, and receive a T-shirt as well,” says Reynolds.

Divided into 29 weeklong races, the Greeneville 200’s overall feedback board consisted of three cars on a giant racetrack: a green car represented the current year’s actual feet per dollar racing against the yellow car (current year’s budget), with the red car representing the actuals for the prior year. Everyone became so involved with winning the races and the plant achieved so many milestones that AG next used an Indy-style racing  theme with a few added twists and turns as they finished even more achievements the following year.

The racetrack scoreboard at the plant entrance roadway which shows which car won last week’s race, a checkered racing flag painted on the foyer floor (Victory Lane), link-in measurements and graphs regularly posted, weekly overall  feedback broadcast on the closed-circuit AGTV, sights and sounds of a racetrack funneled over the public address system, graphs representing department/workgroup efforts, and regular celebrations accented with creative racetrack theme reinforcers: all contributed to the incredible ongoing wins of the plant that continues today.

The original nine-member steering committee received the company-wide Chairman’s Award for their involvement in the effort and graphics designer Garry Renfro recently received that same annual honor for his creativeinput on tying the crucial elements of the theme together for the organization. With the racing theme putting every associate in the driver’s seat, the rubber really met the road with each associate taking responsibility for two jobs: 1) doing things the best known way today, and 2) finding a better way to do them tomorrow. “Real continuous improvement happens at the frontline, at the departmental level,” says Reynolds. “Effective continuous improvement requires positive reinforcement which creates discretionary effort. When we go into this race every day we want to win. The improvements we made in this effort have tipped the scale back towards producing in the U. S. I think the message is that we’ve won that race!” And the data (just a few of which are listed below) back that assertion: 

·         30 percent reduction in press changeover time

·         51 percent reduction in converting changeover time

·          Intercompany lead time reduced by one week

·         Scrap paper reduced by over 36 percent and liquid waste reduced by 47 percent

·         Over $200K reduction in carrier costs

·         Total recordable rate (TRR) reduced 41 percent via Safe Production Teams

·         And overall, an  improvement  of  17.5 percent  in feet per dollar over the plan

 As word spread about the Greeneville plant and other parts of the company wanted to know more, Crawford arrangeda workshop with Justice in Nashville for key leaders  of other American Greetings facilities. Those leaders have since completed ACI  workshops at their own plant locations and are implementing impressive improvement applications of their own.

Crawford’s vision of Accelerating Continuous Improvement throughout American Greetings by unwrapping the power of the people has become a reality.  Passing it forward, Crawford and team members have even met, as mentors, with other local business leaders.  “We’ve saved millions of dollars that point straight back to this process,” says Crawford. “It really wasn’t magic; there’s a science to it and it worked out perfectly.” 

• Leaders and managers champion company values by setting an example with their own personal choices and behaviors.
• Each business transaction is focused on creating an experience for customers that delights them.
• Store leaders and managers are to think strategically and act like owners to maximize success of their operations and their personal successes. This includes considering the short- and long-term impact of decisions and actions as well as the local and systemic impact.

These long-standing principles form the cornerstone of the Pal’s Leadership approach. The overall goal is to create a business system and culture that has a self-replicating passion for excellence.

The key character traits we focus on for store-level leadership and management are:

Decisiveness, Responsibility, Organization, Boldness, Truthfulness, Sincerity, Dependability, Punctuality, Thoroughness, Enthusiasm, Creativity, Initiative, Diligence, Discernment, Flexibility, and Honesty.

When we find an employee with all these characteristics, we know we have a candidate for our Leadership Development Pipeline.

Once trained, or leaders have three primary jobs as store leaders. They are to assess processes, teach and coach, and build relationships with customers. We do not focus them on the store’s daily functional jobs so strongly that they cannot see the big picture and how they fit into it and drive success.

True to our core value of visionary leadership, corporate leadership helps each store create a vision and goals for that specific store and to align it with the corporate vision and goals. To help monitor progress toward the vision and goals, to recalibrate performance to standards, and to define our high level of trust and respect, all corporate visits to a store are announced six weeks in advance, along with an agenda of topics to be reviewed and discussed.

- Thom Crosby, President/CEO Pal’s from Restaurateur’s Insight Into Performance Excellence