Three Levels of Change, all at Sue’s Desk

In ten minutes this morning, my colleague Sue articulated the examples of three levels of continuous improvement.

Strategic Change Sue clearly explained to three other folks in our Purchasing department the impact of our current strategic initiative. We have just released a PC based application to allow our sales crew to spec and price a simple post-frame building in 15 minutes, with all materials lists and prints complete. She explained what that will do for our volume and costs. The group understood and shared her enthusiasm. She explained how we will see the benefits by late this quarter and in a major way in 2003.

Workgroup Improvement From this discussion, Sue slid seamlessly into a description of a three-day blitz or kaizen in which she is a key participant. She’s a key player to describe exactly how certain manufactured components will flow directly from the output of the PC application to our manufacturing facility, with no human intervention required. She stated that the group will be done with this by Thursday...three days after they started.

Local improvement Shifting gears only slightly, Sue then explained that she confirmed late yesterday that an improvement in how we specify and price shingles was implemented. She had identified this as a need last week, talked directly to the right people and made it happen. A simple change, that was done by her, quickly.

Wow!

When I visited Wiremold in August, I saw the most seamless implementation of three levels of change I have ever seen. I’ve been talking about it since, with documentation of how to do each one. This morning, I saw a glimmer of it’s adaptation, in ten minutes. Way to go Sue...she is a learner and I’m not surprised that she grasped it so well.

Does this make sense? Email me and let me know!


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