Level Up! How to go from Good Enough Great!

By Karen Pretorius, CEO KPI Cubed Supply Chain Consulting and Training

How many fires have you put out over the last 2 Covid years? How many of those are still smouldering? More importantly, how many of these fires were preventable?

It seems that South Africa is slowly starting to recover from the pandemic (1) and more and more organisations are seeing their teams return to the office on a regular basis. In this time, we also must help operations of various kinds to go back to basics and question processes, as with work from home, a lot of key experts have not been on the operation floor for a long time. Standards have slipped to meet the crushing demands, and a “make-a-plan” approach to problem solving has been at the order of the day, as resource availability reduced. We collectively in the logistics world had to put out so many fires, and that caused a short term focus instead of long term planning.

Companies need to take a step back and reassess what “bad habits” have slipped in while the world was (is) so volatile. How to bring back standardisation and best practice when most have been focusing on just keeping the companies going and the staff alive. Due to Covid, we have also lost a great number of great minds prematurely, and succession plans in many companies have been adversely affected. How to fill the skills gaps left by those who had to move on or exited for various reasons, how to get back to “good” instead of just “good enough” is what is needed on all logistics levels to streamline opportunities and remove headlines about “logistics shortages”.

We talk to many clients who what to upskill their staff, and all face the same challenges of just not enough time. Like the old saying “if you don’t make time for your health, you will have to make time for your illness”, in the operations world, if you don’t make time to train your staff how to do it right, you will have to make time to deal with fixing the mistakes, redoing the work, and then training them in any case. This is three times the investment in time, materials and people, than having made the time to do it right. There is value in the cliché “measure twice, cut once”.

When we don’t have time for full day or even half day training interventions, bite-size training chunks in short bursts, have proven to be very effective. Management teams and office workers have been privileged to be able to attend many one-hour webinars to up their skills over the last two years, but blue-collar staff at the operational grind often do not have the same opportunity.

How can we do the same then for the blue-collar staff who pack the boxes, operate the machinery and stack the shelves? In most operations, if you had to take out 10% of your staff, for 30-60 minutes once a week, you will still be able to deliver on your operational targets. Rinse and repeat, and work this plan so that all of your staff can have that one hour of skills training.

Make sure you have your daily toolbox talks – it is not just for those in factories! - and also do a 15-30 minute intervention in that time. Once a week is a good start when you have them all together or have split sessions as you can. Build the energy levels again by having an active participation session. Most of us learn better standing up and doing vs sitting at a desk listening.

Many of the LEAN concepts can be demonstrated in such a short time. A new productivity standard or process innovation can be shared. Concepts can be introduced, and the next week be built upon. In the meantime, in just another 15 min per day your supervisory and management teams can follow up and feedback. Start with something simple, like 5S (Sort, Shine, Set in Order, Standardise, Sustain) in a quick demo – be it packing the shelf old to new, small to big, or putting tools and equipment in their place, reinforced learnings will soon start to pay off.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of “Sharpen the Saw” as covered by Stephen Covey, in his book “Seven Habits for Highly Successful People” (2), but the concept rings true whether you are on the coal face or in the office tower. Taking time to learn, improve your skills, maintaining your tools, and looking after yourself, and your staff is an investment in your future.

At KPI Cubed, we take these concepts and apply it to our unique blue collar change management programme, and couple it with bespoke training interventions to ensure successful implementations of new systems and processes. Reach out to Karen@kpi3.co.za to get insight to how we do this.