EMPLOYEE operating procedure Austin TX

I am afraid my shop will go out of business. I just lost my finishing supervisor." In wood products manufacturing many shop owners have found themselves in this uncomfortable situation.

Or you may be experiencing another scenario. Your lead finisher is leveraging your finishing team into his own comfort zone, which may not be in the best interest of your company. Good finishers often understand that they may be hard to replace; therefore, they may take the liberty to pursue an agenda that may not match the goals and directives of your company.

Either situation can be very unhealthy for your company. Good finishers are hard to find — or to replace — if they decide to pursue other interests. It is important to be able to replace and train new employees, or retain qualified finishers in your company. Human resources in finishing are your most valuable asset. Remember they represent the face of your product.

Employee Retention

Providing the necessary resources to retain your finishing team and make them successful long term does not always require higher monetary compensation. The most common problems that demoralize employees and cause them to move to other companies are the work environment, workload scheduling and a finish process that does not perform well. Processes that cause excessive effort or reworks can be very frustrating to the finishing employee.

In the finishing environment, the employees need a clean, well lit work environment to feel positive about their jobs. Implementing a thorough preventive maintenance program will help employees maintain peak performance, and will reduce reworks and rejects. Using the best finishing processes and best practice standards will help ease the effort and workload of your employees.

An evaluation by your equipment or coating supplier, or by an outside consultant, can be very useful in finding recommendations for improvements to your finishing environment as well as your finishing process. A well ventilated work area will help keep your employees healthy and feeling positive about their job.

Scheduling the correct amount of time for the finishing process is a challenge for many manufacturers. There is a balance between taking too long finishing a job and not having enough time to finish a job properly.

We recommend doing actual time studies to identify the minutes required to perform each step of the finishing process. Don't forget to include the total time from material handling, set-up and cleanup for each step of the process. If you are unsure that your time studies are accurate, you may want to check with industry specialists and industry standards to ensure your time studies are in line with basic process standards.

Once you have established actual standard hours, you will be able to schedule the correct time to allow your finishers to complete the job in a timely fashion. Allow some time in the schedule for rush jobs or potential reworks, so as to avoid missing completion dates. Many finishers work under extreme pressure to finish jobs where materials were ordered late or not built on time. In extreme cases, employers have lost valuable employees due to these scheduling issues.

Employee Incentives & Continuous Improvement Programs

We are often surprised how few company leaders in the wood industry have implemented incentive and continuous improvement programs in their companies. Investing in your employees will always provide large returns to your bottom-line profits. If you are considering an incentive or bonus program, they must be performance-based and not an entitlement program. Benchmarks should be based on where you are today and where you want to be in the future. Some good metrics that you may want to use: reducing the internal reworks, meeting established production goals, shipping complete on time, and reducing the number of units returned for quality issues from customers.

These goals and metrics should be set up for the entire finishing team.

Here is an example of how the program may be set up:

The finishing department currently has a 15 percent internal rework rate. It is determined that the finishing team can perform better and realistically they can achieve a 5 percent reduction for the year. That 5 percent reduction in reworks will save the company $100,000.00 per year. Typically 5 to 20 percent of that savings — or $5,000 to $20,000 — will be returned to the employees in the form of a year-end bonus for meeting this one metric component of the incentive program.

With all metrics combined the employee may realize a total bonus value that is a substantial monetary incentive and will add thousands of dollars to your bottom-line profits. The important factor to remember with this arrangement is that all the employees must work as a team to be able to achieve the bonus metrics. Peer pressure will motivate each finisher to perform to the level of excellence required to meet the targeted goals. To make this program work, the goals must be attainable and the tracking systems be in place to verify all the metrics of the program.

Employee Compliance

Employee behavioral compliance is a common problem in the wood finishing industry. Every finisher seems to have a favorite way to apply finishes. Sometimes these problems hold companies back from process improvements or obtaining desired quality or productivity in the finishing department. However, company owners and managers have shared responsibility for these problems.

Most shops do not have a written standard for employees to comply with. Detailed work instructions or Standard Operating Procedures are a base line to secure employee compliance. Equally important to attain employee compliance are quality standards, visuals, such as step panels, and go or no go hard samples. For highly skilled procedures, we recommend shooting high-quality video clips of the technique in the process to uniformly train all team members.

"Franchising" the process may be accomplished by documenting and systemizing 70 percent of the process information in detailed written procedures. Thirty percent of the process is technique driven, and must be taught and maintained by repeatedly offering hands-on training and video instruction.

Summary

Most shop owners in the wood finishing industry are struggling with challenges in their workforce. Developing and implementing the recommendations in this article are proven to produce real results. Systemizing your process and empowering your employees will make you a better company, and will allow you to create a highly skilled workforce.

The question for many managers becomes, "How do I find the time and the resources to develop Standard Operating Procedures, Quality Standards and Incentive Programs?"

Fortunately for American manufacturers, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There are many federal and state agencies throughout the country stepping up to the plate to help wood shops of all sizes develop programs and implement these procedures on all the topics discussed in this article.

Don't wait until your finisher walks out on you. State and federal agencies understand the urgency of the downturn in the wood industry, the shortage of skilled labor, and production going overseas. These agencies provide grant assistance to allow American manufacturers to retain business and create new jobs.

To learn more about these programs call your local economic development agency or AWFI corporate offices.

Ed. note: With an extensive background in the finishing industry, Phil Stevenson is the founder of the American Wood Finishing Institute in Vineland, N.J.