Focus on efficiency
When the company was losing $1 million
a week, Lehman knew she needed to cut
out any excess, and unlike previous managers, she started with the executive team.
With 17 people on the team, she looked at
who had the skills needed in the current
business model and whose skills could
easily adapt if they altered their model.
“Identify the people who will take you to
where you want to go, where the vision is leading you, the people who can keep your
core business running and who are critical
to have to serve your customers,” Lehman
says. “Everything else, at that point, has to
be optional.”
She cut more than half of the team, and that
resonated throughout the company. Today,
she has just seven people on her team.
“It sent a huge sign to the organization
that we started at the top this time,” she
says. “It takes a lot of people in our
kitchens to make up an executive salary,
and people in the kitchen are serving our
customers, and I’m passionate about making sure we serve our customers.”
She wanted to start eliminating waste
throughout the organization, but she
needed someone with experience so she
spent a little money in the hopes of saving a lot more.
“One of the first things we did was find a
lean subject matter expert,” Lehman says.
She wanted someone not only trained in
lean concepts, but who had actually
applied them in a manufacturing world, so
she hired someone who had 20 years of
experience as a change agent at Delphi.
With an expert on board, LSG Sky Chefs
could move forward with cutting excess,
and just like with the executive layoffs, she
wasn’t about to start small.
“You don’t start with a kitchen that has 20
employees,” she says. “You start where you
have 600 or 700 employees.”
With 50 locations across the continent,
Lehman took the 20 largest and made them
showcase units. She used these units to
start developing a continuous improvement mindset in her 8,000 employees.
“That doesn’t happen overnight,” she
says. “Lean is about two things: It’s about
leadership and knowledge. I believe 110
percent that the leaders have to support it
and drive it, and it’s about the knowledge
that our employees hold and getting that
into implementation.”
Her team performed 75 process improvement events in the showcase kitchens each
year. If there was an event in Dallas, any kitchen staff members that had a similar
customer base or was geographically close
to Dallas was invited to come and work the
event, so they could learn and apply those
lessons in their own kitchen.
“With the mindset of continuous improvement, it’s not change for change sake,”
Lehman says. “If it doesn’t improve anything,
whether it’s the ergonomics or the efficiency
or the quality of products, don’t do it.”
It’s also important to not tell employees
exactly what to do, but instead encourage
them to use their own observations to
make things better.
“Give the people some tools, and they’ll
figure out a better way,” Lehman says. “… It’s
not management doing it or the supervisor
saying, ‘You must do it this way.’ It’s the
employees that developed that fire inside
them to make their workplace the best.”
Those same employees were the ones that
also saw 40 percent of their friends lose
their jobs when airlines began taking food
off planes, so when you’re implementing big
changes like this, be aware that not everyone
will be as excited as you are initially.
“It’s a journey,” Lehman says. “It doesn’t
happen overnight. It’s almost like a culture
change, and those take years to develop.
Our employees, there are some that are
skeptical when you go in. Once you make
an improvement that they thought of,
there’s a certain amount of ownership.”
As employees attended these events,
applied them to their own kitchens and
worked to improve, LSG Sky Chefs got
leaner. For instance, in the Denver kitchen,
employees have 200,000 square feet of
space, and when they started the process,
employees wore pedometers to see how
far they walked each day — one walked 12
miles each day. After implementing lean
principles and rearranging the layout, that
employee is down to three miles a day.
“That still sounds like a lot, but 12 is nearly half a marathon,” Lehman says.
In the Phoenix location, employees took
up two buildings. By refocusing on how
they loaded airplane soda drawers, they freed up an entire building.
“The more you do, the more you see,” she
says. “At that point, you can’t stop.”
Even as LSG Sky Chefs’ kitchens
improved, Lehman didn’t let people rest.
“Our tagline is we want to be better today
than we were yesterday, we want to be better this month over last month, and we
want to be better this year over last year,”
Lehman says. “If you develop that mindset,
and it’s part of the fabric of every employee’s DNA, that’s how you change it.”
