Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303260546
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By George Kegley/Staff writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
With the goal of providing its customers "quality and reliable service at low cost," the Roanoke-based electric utility has 53 employee teams working at power plants, district crews and offices. They have solved 24 major problems and more than 300 "quick success" projects, said Sam Hartman, Apco's training supervisor.
Some examples of team problems, he said, are faster restoration of electric service after an outage, reducing paperwork, improving work methods, reducing capital expenses, improving maintenance procedures and maximizing storage space.
Apco started its quality process 2 1/2 years ago, Hartman said, when the utility decided that "customers, shareholders and employees could be better served by increased employee involvement and improvement in company operations."
Carilion Health System
A dozen Carilion hospitals are looking at ways to shorten patients' waiting time in emergency rooms, decrease patient falls, reduce laboratory test turnaround time, speed up the admissions process and decrease delays in surgery.
The company's hospitals, including Roanoke Memorial and Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley, want to decrease the length of a hospital stay for a significant diagnosis of patients, said Judie Snipes, a Carilion vice president.
Her list of needs for improvement goes on. The hospitals are trying to streamline paperwork, they want to reduce their own late charges for services, and improve the processes for ordering and storing of supplies.
"Our primary focus is the person who receives the service," Snipes said. Each hospital looks at its own problems.
Corning Inc.
Corning, a Blacksburg maker of ceramic filters for catalytic converters used in Japanese and Korean cars, said it is working toward higher-quality products with a higher-quality work force. In the company's "partnership" with the American Flint Glass Workers Union, employees are redesigning the manufacturing processes, setting workplace rules and even participating in hiring of new workers.
The goal is for every employee to be able to perform every task in the plant. They have work weeks of three or four days with longer shifts. And they are expected to have continuous training, part of it on their days off. The plant has "a no-layoff mentality," said Robert Hoover, the manager.
Corning, according to a recent article in The Washington Post, is about as close to Japanese-style lifetime employment as an American company can come.
FiberCom Inc.
Seventeen continuous improvement teams are working toward customer satisfaction at FiberCom, a Roanoke fiber optics company. Teams composed of workers from the shop floor and management are solving problems by using statistical process control techniques, a set of analysis methods to establish if the output is consistent and within an expected or predictable range, said Harry Mott, quality manager of government programs.
FiberCom and Virginia Transformer Corp. are moving toward implementation of International
Standards Organization (ISO) 9000, an international system quality standard. Meeting global standards for quality will be required of all companies doing business in the Common Market in Europe, according to Amitav Mukerji of Virginia Transformer.
Newbern-Trane Inc.
A Roanoke heating, ventilation and air conditioning contractor, Newbern-Trane has 63 employees who are taking "baby steps" toward Total Quality Management, according to Leah Coffman, marketing coordinator. "We're trying to cut out duplications and take away redundancies," she said.
The company is going through "every system, process by process to try to make it more customer responsive . . . Our goal is to delight the customer."
Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern
Increased production, higher morale, better training and overall coordination are expected from total quality management at Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern, a regional architectural, engineering and planning firm based in Roanoke.
Its computer-aided design and drafting (CADD) department is moving toward replacing two shifts with one, said Steve Garrett, a vice president. The two shifts, from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., were established to justify "very expensive hardware and software,' but the cost of the equipment has dropped significantly, Garrett said.
Quality control procedures have resulted in 75 percent of its business coming from repeat customers, he said.
The company's quality teams identify probable causes of deficiencies and recommend changes in the policy, process or procedure that will improve performance, according to Garrett.
General Electric Co.
At GE's Drive Systems Division in Salem a copier reduction team produced an immediate savings of $40,000 and promise of annual savings of $56,000. They did it by devising a strategy to reduce the number of the plant's copiers from 50 to 30, as well as lowering the number of copies being made. Several other copying machines were underutilized, a company report said.
Another quality team found the root cause of the listing of an improper part on a job supply order. The job required a twisted wire but this was not specified.
The team said assemblers formerly corrected the problem each time it occurred but the problem has been permanently solved.
The plant, which makes electronic controls for industrial machines, is under competitive pressure to increase productivity and eliminate waste. In late 1991, the factory's general manager, Tom Brock, told workers to face layoff of 300 people if conditions weren't improved.
L'Eggs Products Inc.
After 18 months in its Total Quality Management program, this Salem hosiery distribution center sees increases in efficiency and productivity, decreased errors and better attendance, according to John Higgins, the manager. "The only way our company will survive is by empowering our employees," he said. L'eggs is a division of Chicago-based Sara Lee Corp.
L'eggs employees are more involved in all aspects of the business, Higgins said. Working on cross-functional teams, they learn how to do other jobs so they can fill in during vacations and illness. Departments learn to work together and employees "want to understand customers' needs and expectations in order to meet and exceed them," he said.
Norfolk Southern Corp.
Thoroughbred Quality is the Norfolk-based railroad's name for its continuous improvement process. Jim Waters, an assistant vice president, said NS emphasizes "giving customers what they ask for . . . We don't emphasize savings."
In its first phase, the company has looked at improving its method of sending timely and correct freight bills to customers. Billing accuracy has risen from 88 percent to 92 percent in the last four years.
On-time performance of trains has improved by 1 percentage point to 87 percent in the last two years toward a goal of 95 percent by 1995. NS charts show improvement in customer satisfaction on issues of service, the amount of rejected coal and merchandise rail cars and damage claims.
For improvements in quality, NS awards catalog prizes to hourly employees and pays cash to salaried workers. Individual accomplishments that have been cited include recovering overpayment for destroyed equipment, improving sight distances at highway crossings and helping collect $250,000 in past-due bills from another railroad.
Shenandoah Life Insurance Co.
Starting in the 1980s, Shenandoah Life formed customer service teams who found a need to combine the functions of policies, policyholder service and premium accounting. This enabled the Roanoke-based company to combine 17 jobs into one, said Dick Wagner, vice president. Employees were cross-trained to handle other jobs and the company began a pay-for-knowledge system.
The next phase was self-managed work teames that determine how work is processed. These teams redistribute work when an employee is away from the job and they assist other teams when they have work-flow problems.
From 1985 to 1992, customer service teams recorded an 80 percent decrease in budgeted overtime, a 48 percent increase in total work volume and a 102 percent increase in the average number of service requests processed per employee, Wagner said.
Times-World Corp.
The publisher of the Roanoke Times & World-News has recorded improvement in several areas of its production and circulation departments since adopting the corporate-wide Continuous Improvement program.
In 1992, its first full year under the quality program, operating expenses were reduced by 1 percent, according to Carl Wright, the company's treasurer. More than 7,000 manhours of work was saved and redirected to operations where value was added, he said.
In the circulation department, the number of telephone complaint calls that went unanswered has been reduced from 33 percent to 4 percent in the last 4 years. An employee team has looked at shortages of newspaper bundles delivered to carriers.
Other continuous improvement teams studied problems related to wet newspapers, customers' newspaper tubes and they were able to reduce the number of people needed to answer telephones.
Newsprint waste has been reduced by 1 percent by better control of the process, Wright said. Also, by requiring similar quality standards of suppliers of newsprint, the newspaper has lowered its stockpile of paper from 45 to 20 days worth of inventory, thus cutting costs for warehousing.
Volvo GM Heavy Duty Truck
The Dublin truck plant of Volvo GM is in the "very embryo" stage of trying to create a quality management climate, said Dan Grubb, manager of training and compensation. Education of the work force of 1,250 toward a change in attitude and philosophy has started. The plant "definitely will have problem-solving teams," Grubb said.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***