Partnerships are Key in Continuous Improvement By / Jordan Whitehouse Back in 2008, in the midst of the recession, Sheet Metal Connectors (SMC) made a somewhat surprising announcement: they were embarking on a company-wide process of improving operations. Unlike many companies that were looking to cut costs as quickly as possible at the time, the Minneapolis-based fabrication shop actually decided to invest the time, training, and resources needed to find areas of improvement. And, as President Jim Myers explained it, this wasn’t going to be a onetime blitz. Improvement was going to be a continuous and systematized practice throughout the company. It also wasn’t going to be a top-down exercise where ideas and solutions would be dictated by management, and labor simply had to go along. It would be a collaborative effort. “Everyone at SMC received the same base training—management, shipping, sheet metal workers, sales, and customer service,” Myers says. “In our cross-functional groups there are no bosses and employees. Everyone has the same footing, and all ideas are valid and debated. Everyone gets their hands dirty.” Although it’s understandable that many companies may have been unable to embark on a similar process of continuous improvement during the recession, research shows that in the years since, construction companies have continued to struggle. According to survey results published in a New Horizons Foundation paper entitled “Building a Culture of Continuous 10 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
Improvement,” only 41% of contractors said they had a great history of implementing new ideas and sticking to them. Management consultant Clark Ellis believes that this struggle is particularly acute for some union contractors right now, and if it continues, market share is on the line. “Competition continues to intensify, and non-union companies are doggedly focused on improving their productivity and delivering more value,” he says. “So, if union contractors don’t keep pace, they’re going to lose market share.” There is hope, however, adds Ellis, who has worked regularly with SMACNA and SMART for the past 20 years. “We find time and again that when contractor management and labor work together, they are in a much stronger competitive position than when they aren’t working together and collaboratively.” Getting started No two continuous improvement plans look exactly the same, but as the New Horizons paper suggests, the plan should encompass several components. These include defining the problem; measuring what needs to be measured to define, track, and improve the problem; and analyzing the data to find the core causes of the problem. From there, the process should be improved and then regularly measured to figure out if it’s working.
