Presentation by Mike Fleming, Sara Lee Knit Products
MR. ALEXANDER: Mike, are you ready to share with us your story?
MR. FLEMING: I feel the power. Thank you, Dave. I will be your ergo evangelist for the next 30 minutes. First of all, I would like to thank my mother and father for their small part in me being here today. I think everybody else has been thanked.
As a part of this presentation David asked me to speak a little bit to the point of effective program management and some things that I feel like have been very effective for me. So really about a third of my presentation is solely on the evaluation side. I think there is going to be some points that you will hear me make in the next 20 minutes or so that will help you overall in your ergonomic process implementation.
I want to give you a little brief overview of what we do, what Sara Lee Knit Products does, and go through a model for ergonomic program evaluation, at least in my opinion. It essentially consists of three step: planning, executing and evaluating. This first step I say moving from Polyanna to Project manager. Who is Polyanna? Well, I was the first year that I was implementing our program about six years ago. I didn't really realize that everybody wouldn't be as passionate as I was or want to go out and do the things as aggressively as I wanted them done. So we put a few measurements in place to help with that.
First of all, most of you, I am sure, have heard of Sara Lee Corporation, but we are down a couple of levels from that. The Sara Lee Corporation itself is a $19 billion company, and has four major operating divisions. We package meats and bakery, coffee and grocery, household and personal care and then the personal products division.
The Personal Products Division, which I am part of, is based in Winston Salem, North Carolina. It is about a $7 billion operation. Some of the divisions are Sara Lee Hosiery, Sara Lee Socks, Sara Lee Bodywear, Coach, Isotoner, Sara Lee Direct and Sara Lee Knit Products. SLKP, at the bottom, operates on a mission to clothe the Americas from head to toe. We are about a $2 billion operation. Most of the products you have already heard mentioned. Hopefully, most of you are wearing those. We may have a waistband check at the end of the session. I don't know.
As David mentioned, I am responsible for coordinating and implementing our comprehensive program in about 50 sites in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Central America, Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, et cetera. The Sara Lee Corporation has a very decentralized approach to letting their divisions operate. So whether it is in safety and health (which ergonomics is part of) engineering, facilities management, whatever, the corporation is decentralized enough to be allowed to do the things that we want to do and the way that we want to do them.
I think there is maybe an unspoken strategy here. You didn't hear this from me, but this came into my mind a couple days ago. Maybe we are trying to fatten everybody up with the cheesecake so that they will buy more underwear. I don't know. Maybe not.
I think my comments are related to any size organization, large or small. This concept or this model -- (and this is going to be the slide that I am going to work the most from) -- resulted from my sitting down to really figure out why do you evaluate. What do we really want to accomplish? Going back to the first part of this, we have got to do a lot of planning. We have got to plan for continuous improvement. Most of you, I am sure, work for companies that are advocates of continuous improvement. These can include quality, customer satisfaction or whatever.
I think as an ergonomist or ergonomics specialist, we have got to plan for continuous improvement in our programs. If we want to move to the level that is called an ergonomics culture, where people are wanting to do this, it is in the design stage, design phase (and I have 25,000 people participating) that we have got to do a lot of things to keep the initiative going from year to year.
I am going to show you a couple of tools in each of these sections that we use to help with each step. The second phase is the execute. That is where we are doing things, doing activities, doing job analysis, employee training, et cetera, and then finally out here on the right hand side, the evaluation. Measuring the program results. You can see both the middle and the last phase move back into that initial planning phase.
What I want to learn is what is going on in the center section, and in the evaluation phase to bring back to the front end of the process, continue the process from year to year, and keep the enthusiasm going. You see benchmarking, of course, here and a couple of tools similar to what David has mentioned.
With planning I like this quote from "Alice in Wonderland". Alice came to a crossroad, and Mr. Cheshire Cat was sitting there. Many of you have probably have seen this. I see some smiles out there. She asked: Which road should I take? Mr. Cheshire Cat said: Where are you going, Alice? Alice answered: I don't know. Mr. Cheshire Cat replied: Then it doesn't really matter what road you take.
So we have got to move away from the aspect of just doing ergonomics to figure out how to use it. Why is this essential? In my opinion, management is implementing an ergonomics process for a lot of reasons. Maybe it is injury and illness rates. Maybe it is to improve productivity, to improve product quality, customer satisfaction or whatever. It should only be apparent to everybody in the room that we should be doing a better job of implementing continuous improvement back into the ergonomics program.
David is well known for his 10 reasons that ergonomic programs fail. In my experience, after being involved with ergonomics for about 10 years, I don't think companies, at least the companies that I talk to (and some of these are Sara Lee companies) don't plan enough for continuous improvement. Companies get to a point where they have done a lot of things and they hit a brick wall. They have lost the momentum. They have lost the enthusiasm, and they haven't linked ergonomics back to their other key company initiatives. You have got quality, diversity and others. There are lots of initiatives out there.
Let me go back to the planning process and finish up on that. This first process phrase is where we get the resources together. This is where we say what do we need, where do we want to go, what do we want to do. This is when we build ownership, and the resources that we establish can be industrial engineering, it could be safety and health, it could be medical. You have got to be up front. You have got to understand what needs to be done and who is going to do what when. You may have to stop that process from time to time and say wait a minute; we are not achieving what we need to achieve or we don't have engineering linked into the process. That happens to us frequently. You have got to stop and assess where you are.
With those as priorities what I found after, again, that first year of being Polyanna, is we need to build plans into standards of performance. How many of you work for companies that have standards of performance or some similar title that your management is measured on? Okay. How many of those plans have pay at risk? If I don't get this done -- okay, still some hands up. We wanted that pay at risk, and I found out the best way to get ergonomics implemented easily without too much pain (because I don't like pain), is to put it in people's standards of performance. That is what we have done.
This is an action plan chart for the division that I do on an annual basis. Now, each facility has their own chart. They have their own plan, and what I want you to drop down to is number seven and eight here. This is where we have implemented (about a year ago) assessing our ergonomics program. I want to talk a little bit about how we did that. What the facilities are working on, is putting together a two year plan to go back to their individual assessment, go back to their section scores that are under 2.5 and then under a 3.0, and build a two year plan to bring those sections up. Well, I hope you see that where I am getting to, is building this continuous improvement loop.
Now to the middle phase. Let's move right on over there. Executing, this is where we are, again, doing things, doing projects, getting things accomplished. Those again, come off the plan. One of the things that I do to help in accountability (and this was not really well received when I first started it) is any facility that has a job analysis underway for an individual job, has to send me one of these status reports every month.
So let's say it is a knitter or a cloth inspector or whatever. I require this. It comes from a team. It is typically hand written. The facilities send them into the Safety and Ergonomics Department Office on a certain date each month. What is going on? What has been completed? Any problems? Down at the bottom any additional comments that they would like to put like please call me, or whatever and percent implemented.
Now, where that feeds into is the report that we have also monthly. This comes out with our safety management report. It covers all the recordable, lost time, and those kinds of things for this facility and the division. The location, of course, you see down on the left-hand side. Basically, I want to put a column on here, (going back to that action plan chart) of anything that they are supposed to accomplish each year and the date that it was supposed to be done and when it was done, et cetera.
Every job analysis has to come across my desk for review. I review it, send it back, make suggestions or approve it as is, and then they put together a plan to implement. So this really helps a lot with the accountability and the evaluation, because very easily each facility manager, each director, each vice president can see where they are on a monthly basis. That really takes a lot of heat off me, once everybody gets comfortable with the system. Again, I think the more you can do on the front end (in the planning stage) when you are laying out your program to help to make those expectations understood, the better of you are going to be.
I put this overhead together to typify my belief in what we should be doing as ergonomic program managers. We should be building bridges to take us from peak to peak to peak. This is the continuous improvement process. I want to go from here to here to here to here and on up. The ergonomics culture may be up here for me. It may be right here for somebody else. It may be here for another company, et cetera, but taking the evaluation processes that we have and building from the start -- you know, a new program, initial training, setting goals, building success and ownership, taking responsibility, et cetera.
I am sure you are no different from us in what happens sometimes when we move up this peak. Things happen, right? An unplanned event happens. Some key person leaves, (i.e., ergonomics program coordinator) a plant manager changes, conflicts with other competing activities, etc. What happens? We start to slide down the other side of the mountain. Now, it is my job to see this happening globally. This gets a little challenging sometimes, but what I do is to get on the phone, make some phone calls, pay a visit to the site and say hey, folks, what do we need to do to get back on track? Then, ultimately, we use our plan to move to the next peak -- peak to peak to peak. So a lot of things are going on right here, but ergonomics program success over time, again, building our culture, has got to rely on these bridges.
Going back to my key slide -- I am not as organized as you were, David, in flipping those over. That looked real good. I learned something today.
So let's get over here. Evaluating, let's measure where our program is so that we can come back and build continuous improvement. I am going to take you into a site and show you what they have and where they are. This is a textile operation. These are hand written in most cases. This is in North Carolina with 750 people at the site. It is a t-shirt plant, and also it makes sport shirts. This scoresheet describes each of the eight sections, the sections score, the adjusted score, et cetera, and then how they scored out or fared out or in this case I just put "Xs" out here. We could use bar charts or something similar.
I think it is important, and David had asked me to share with you some ideas and some ways that we implemented this process. It was a little bit different, I think. The first thing that I did was to get all of the site coordinators together in one location, the ergonomic program coordinators. I had David actually train them in how to do an ergonomic assessment using this tool. That helped a lot to bring together the ownership for the process. The second thing that I did the same year (again, about a year ago)when we had all the plant managers and directors together, was to give them all an update on what an effective ergonomics process was. As part of that hour presentation, I had them assess one of the sections themselves. Again, that helped to buy some of that familiarity and some of that ownership.
Each facility then (in this case Forest City) went back and did a self-assessment of their own program with their team. They got their teams together and went through the 50 questions. That score was not shared with the plant manager at that particular time, and I will tell you why soon. The next step involved me visiting each site, sitting down with the team, going through the 50 questions and assessing their self-assessment. I found out, by and large, the facility team did a really excellent job in scoring themselves. They took a lot of pride and took a lot of ownership, and this really helped to make things a whole lot easier when I went in.
As well, they were in a much better grasp of where they were and where they maybe were not. We established our benchmarks, again, a 2.5 and a 3.0. The team then developed, and are now in the process of implementing this two year plan for improvement. The other thing that I did not do, was share the scores with anyone else, or any other plants. We didn't issue report cards to say this is what Forest City did, this is what Galax did, et cetera. I didn't want the thing to be misinterpreted. Sometimes people get numbers and make generalizations about them that sometimes aren't always correct.
What I want to show you really here, though, is what Ken and his team did. They focused on Section 6, the ergonomic training and skill development and also eight which had a score of 2.0, ergonomic program results. Let me show you the action plan that they put together. This is totally without any assistance from me at all, and I think it is excellent some of the things that they have come up with.
Question 6(a)(1), employee exposure to ergonomic information. The first activity they came up with was to intensify the ergonomics training in new employee orientation. He is going to increase the topic time on ergonomics from 40 minutes to an hour. He is going to have the supervisor, twice a year have an ergonomics contact with each of their employees. Twice a year he is going to put ergonomics articles in his plant newsletters. Now, what I want you to see here, okay, is that these are specific, they are measurable, and we can come out here on the right-hand side, put completion dates and then come back and see when he actually did these.
This report comes in to me on a quarterly basis. Then when I got out to the facilities, I sit down with the team on their program assessment and on their action plans. I talk to them about where they are, what they have accomplished, any barriers, bottlenecks, et cetera. For Ken, the site ergo specialist, he said he is going to attend at least two ergo related training sessions a year. Again, I hope you see that this is going to come back and build continuous improvement in the process. Committee meetings, he is going to start to do a better job at documenting. They weren't doing a very good job in documenting what they were doing at the meetings. So you see, and I don't think I need to go into any other examples here. I think you see how the process has worked very well for us. I am very, very pleased with it.
I realized about two to two and a half years ago that I needed something like this. I didn't realize it was called an evaluation. I just knew that we had done a lot of things. I knew that I had what David called a baseline audit. I only had 22 questions in mine. So I want to get a copy of his. He has more questions. So we had done that kind of initial baseline assessment, but we didn't have any kind of numerical scoring system to work towards.
The final three points I want to leave with you is what I expect from a good evaluation system are really three things. First, giving us an accepted program benchmark. When the facility scores themselves and when I sit down an concur with their scores -- and it typically takes about an hour and a half to sit down and go through each of the 50 questions because some of them I said well, I am not sure that you guys are quite here. So there was a lot of good sharing there. When I left we all agreed that is where they were.
Secondly, it developed a lot of site ownership. The facility really knew where they wanted to go, and now they could measure from the finish line continuous improvement. Finally, any good evaluation system, whether you use this one or any other ones that are out there, it should give you specific measurable targets for improvement. That is really both at the site and back to the central person, which in our case is me, because I can see and I have learned a lot by using this methodology and approach to see where gaps are.
One of the things that we realized was that we had done a lot of great office ergonomics work at the division offices where I work. There are 1,200 people in that building, and I think I have a really adequate ergonomics process, but the plant offices didn't. We were out working on the industrial side. So that was one of the things that I built into our chart for this year. So it has really helped both. With that, those are the points that I wanted to make. Thank you very much.
MR. ALEXANDER: Thank you very much, Mike, again. It is an extensive effort. It is amazing to me when you put these tools in the hands of people who actually have to do the work and how useful they can become and how they really make the tool work for them. I think Mike showed that.
