Ed Cote, the president and co-founder of Whitemud Ironworks knows that talk is cheap when it comes to productivity.
“It’s relatively simple coming up with process improvement ideas; the difficult part is turning the ideas into solutions, and then making them stick.”
The structural steel fabrication and erection company has been around since 1989. He runs a large shop with more than 250 employees and three manufacturing facilities. They take raw steel and design, fabricate and erect the structural backbones of large institutional and commercial structures. Their clients include Ledcor, Stuart Olsen and PCL Construction.
The life cycle of a process improvement at Whitemud Ironworks has a definite course. Whitemud has a particular plan about how things are done when process improvement comes up.
“Ensuring that a process becomes routine in a semi-controlled environment can be really challenging. We think we have control of our environments but we don’t.”
It all starts with language. By calling it a business improvement process it helps the team focus on what the end result must be and helps avoid the pitfalls of improving a localized process at the expense of everyone else.
The structure of their process improvement plan looks like this
- Identify the area in which the process improvement will occur
- Establish an improvement team
- That team should have a facilitator and one or two team members, preferably downstream from the area of concern. They prefer downstream staff, “Because they are the customer of the prior area.”
- The team must have someone from management
- Establish a mandate for the team. This will become a formalized and written process. “If you don’t get it down on paper you’re just shooting the breeze,” says Cote
- Establish the goals and objectives of the team within the mandate
- Emphasize and define what success would look like
- “Clearly define the responsibilities of the team, the team leader and the facilitator”
- The facilitator has to be neutral and a non-participant in the process at hand
- Management will define what kind of support will be offered, whether it’s people, time or money
- Establish a schedule with implementation plans and fixed dates
- Identify a management sponsor. They’re there to remove roadblocks and ensure team success
Even with all of this in place, process improvement can be tricky.
“These things always take more time than you plan. You always bite off more than you can chew,” says Cote. “You have to get down to small improvements. If you try to grab too big of a piece you’ll get stuck in a quagmire. We like small victories. It helps build steam.”
Cote is a big believer in this process and has always seen positive improvement when this structure has been implement. Not only that but, “The intangibles are that your people get involved in formalized processes and you start to train them. People start to understand that they don’t live in their own silo and everything they do is linked to other people.”
Cote was generous enough to share with Productivity Alberta a generic process improvement plan that Whitemud Ironworks has developed and uses across their operations. Feel free to download it and apply it to a process improvement at your business.
