When on boarding new FedEx employees, part of the process includes an introduction to Quality Driven Management (QDM). For the team at a newly acquired FedEx facility, that meant adopting a fresh approach for process improvements.
Giving Power to the People
While onboarding the new team members at this facility, the existing FedEx employees collaborated with new team members to overhaul the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) facility-wide as a way to demonstrate QDM in action.
Existing FedEx team members reviewed the current SOPs for the facility to walk new team members through:
• Each QDM tool they planned to use (specifically the ABLE process explained below)
• How it would help empower the team members
• The steps required to ensure the project would be successful
ASSESS PHASE: Whiteboard sessions allowed every employee to share their thoughts.
BUILD PHASE: Reviewing initial drafts of the new SOPs helped employees believe that the changes would be implemented, providing buy-in from all the team members, including management.
LAUNCH PHASE: Through orientation meetings, management determined which tools would be required for training and how to explain the new SOPs to team leads.
EVALUATE PHASE: While SOP development is ongoing, the initial implementation saw huge benefits for the entire facility, including:
INCREASED EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
BOOSTED EMPLOYEE MORALE
GREATER TIME SAVINGS
The work included the Receiving team and the Data Capture team — groups that historically had different ideas about the ideal SOP. Management described it as "one of the best meetings they had ever experienced" between the two teams and it created a stronger working relationship, thanks, in large part, to QDM. The facility receiving team can now process more packages with fewer employees within the same eight-hour workday.
Employees |
Trailers |
Hours |
|
|---|---|---|---|
Before QDM |
18 |
2 |
8 |
After QDM |
16 |
4 |
8 |
Team Member Inspired by Quality Driven Management
Senior Engineer in Package Recovery Operations, Josh Russell, is a QDM advocate. While working on the SOP project, Josh saw the importance of using QDM to address inefficiencies: "Using all the QDM tools really works. I learned that they're interdependent, meaning each one depends on the other and you really have to do them all to be effective with QDM."