Assess the problem
One of the first things Roeder discovered as he began digging was that the company was relying too much on top-level data to judge performance.
He learned this as he gathered a dozen or so managers and directors together for a couple of days of dialogue to discuss how everyone went about doing their jobs.
“I had everybody submit to me what you would do differently,” Roeder says. “I encouraged them to talk to their people. What would you want to change? What would you want to see different? When I did that, I got 12 or 14 different formats. It required me to say, ‘I’m going to put this in a format that I can give it back and review it with them.’ That’s what we did with each individual.”
“As we started to drill down to understanding the numbers, we started to see we were looking at numbers way too much on a macro level. There were dynamics going on that a macro level just didn’t bring to life.”
Roeder took the example of one of the company’s facilities where multiple logistical services were provided.
“The facility would show up being profitable,” Roeder says. “When you really drilled down to the different service types and then, even more importantly, down to individual customers, you started to realize that not every aspect of that facility is producing the results you anticipated or desired. So why is it down? What’s driving this particular piece of business to meet or not meet expectations?”
The key thing to remember when considering change in your organization is that you have to know where you’re starting. You can’t fix a problem when you don’t know exactly what the problem is.
“You have to start with the data that you have,” Roeder says. “You can’t start and say, ‘I’m going to build a measurement based on data that I’ll have in the future and that I don’t have now.’ You’ve got to start with what you’ve got. You may make a project in the future and say, ‘I’m going to change my data source so I can enhance my effectiveness in doing this.’ That may become a desired future state. But you don’t start there. You start with the data you have.”
Roeder gathered his data by going through each functional area of his company.
“We started off by saying, ‘OK, let’s look at our material handlers,’” Roeder says. “We have some who are doing validation and check-in at our northern center where we consolidate. Then we have some that are down on the receiving end that are unloading trucks and making deliveries to customers. We just said, ‘How many pieces per man-hour? How many tons per man-hour? We’re fortunate we had a computer system with the software to support that functionality that has a clock on it. We could start to see how much volume at what time of day is flowing through that location. So you come up with a productivity measurement.”
After the data were gathered and distributed to his leaders, they could begin talking about what they had found.
“We started to understand how people’s projects might interface and have a cause and effect on another sector,” Roeder says. “From that, we said, ‘These are the major initiatives we want to take on for each group.’ It really gave us a nice single document that we were tracking the change against.”
Roeder had his baseline from which he could begin to make changes. But there was still some heavy lifting to be done.
