SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE CONTROLTEK
Building a Culture of First Time Right
W
ho has the time to do the same job twice? That’s right—no one. This rather simple insight lead the leadership of CONTROLTEK to make “First Time Right” the cornerstone of their business. “We believe that it’s no longer enough to do the job right for the customer—everyone expects that,” said Dave Hardeman, the company’s director of client solutions delivery. “To truly deliver value, we have to save every minute of a client’s time possible, which lead us to the concept of First Time Right. It started in our installations team and spread quickly through the rest of the company. With this approach, we were able to not just delight our customers but also improve internal efficiencies, drive our costs down, and pass the Dave Hardeman savings to our clients.”
First Time Right in Action
According to Hardeman, the concept is pretty easy to understand but trickier to implement. “The focus for installers used to be to get to the job site, install the system according to specifications, and call it the day. But this is a fire-ready-aim approach. We start by asking the client what First Time Right means for them—how they envision a successful rollout of their new systems. And it can be surprising how different answers can be. We then write the plan and define key performance indicators (KPIs) together with the client.” For one retail chain, Hardeman explained, the focus was on the aesthetics. The new RFID systems were expected to work as promised, of course, but the number one priority was that they had to blend in with the store’s overall look. “So in addition to working with the retailer’s LP team, we also engaged their merchant team. We brought in a designer to work on the project with us and shared the drawings and concepts with the merchants to make sure that what we were doing was in line with their brand guidelines. The result was a very happy merchant team and a very happy LP team—two groups of people with different goals.” At the same time, CONTROLTEK was preparing a large EAS systems rollout with another retailer that had a very different philosophy. “Their focus,” said Hardeman, “was on visual deterrence, so it was almost the opposite from the other retailer. This client wanted to maximize the visibility of the solutions we were installing, so our team members with LP backgrounds worked directly with the client’s LP team to develop guidelines and schematics of
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how the finished installation should look.” This project was a smashing success too. “If we treated these two projects the same, we would not have had happy clients. In our minds the installations would have been completed as promised if the systems worked, but in the clients’ minds they would have been a failure if their additional requirements were not met.”
The Unintended Benefits
Steve Sell, CONTROLTEK’s vice president of global sales and marketing, saw wider benefits of this approach. “Dave and his team saved our clients tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary service visits through their First Time Right focus. This made a tremendous positive impact in our client relationships, so it only Steve Sell made sense to make First Time Right a strategic initiative across our entire organization.” Sell explained that each team was asked to define its own metrics around First Time Right. Employees were
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