Just when you thought the business was going in right direction, a series of missteps with a major customer turns into a critical and urgent re-evaluation of the plant’s performance reliability.
This privately held, multi-plant producer of natural products, was facing quality challenges, order fulfillment issues, and encroaching competition. All of this within the COVID “cloud” added to the complexities with workforce shortages and turnover.
Plant leadership expanded the role of FSO Institute (engaged to improve quality and operational reliability) to assess and diagnose the root causes and to facilitate the development of the path forward.
The “Focus on the Floor” leadership concluded as their burning platform and presented the 90 day plan to corporate for immediate implementation.
Challenge
- Major customer follows audit with imperative to improve or else lose the business
- Turnover of factory personnel was extraordinarily high
- Corporate “support” in many ways proved to be conflicting directives
Action
- Reduce turnover in plant workforce by 75% by providing competitive wages and developing an engaged workforce
- Implement FMDS (Floor Management Developmental System) process through servant leadership and Lean tools
- Remove the communication silos and barriers that were negatively impacting product consistency and order fulfillment
Results
As noted recently by the Site Manager;
“we learned through our engagement coaches from FSO who taught us not only the Lean FMDS (Floor Management Developmental System) process, but how servant leadership within this process can drive characteristics like communication, accountability for self and others, common vision, and cultural fit. We are continuing to learn how to apply the programs as a tool rather than a task in our continuous improvement efforts across all areas. We lost some people along the way because they were not a right fit, but we came out stronger at the end and our retention has been steadily improving when most organizations are struggling to maintain.”
“The beauty of what we have done is not only greatly accelerated our cultural growth and results while the coaches were here, we continued to improve after they left. That major customer we talked about is now very happy to see the organizational growth and improvements.”
