Drifter
Footballguy
This seems like a good enough place to vent. For those with very extensive notebooks, I closed down the business I was managing last month and went to work on (hopefully) a short term basis for the company that took over one of the major accounts the old business used to have.
The pay is good for what the gig is but not what I'd like to be making. Typically the people who manage the various branches around the country are guys who have been promoted up from the driver level and are 100% tactical, address only what's in your face type managers. Coming from where I came from, I'm used to having the scope of my responsibilities also including quite a bit more strategic and analytical responsibilities.
Anyway, for this account one of our key metrics is accuracy. Accuracy is driven by a number of factors - loaders and drivers (my employees) and receiving personnel (customer employees) The minimum accuracy required by the customer is 85%. We are currently average between 90-95% week to week.
I did some data compilation and analysis and found a nice and tidy Pareto principle. 20% of the customer locations were responsible for 50% of the accuracy errors. Furthermore, many of the offending locations were at the very top in terms of receiving speed (pieces per hour). I sent a very nice email to the local management (leaving out the corporate management who tend to over-react) thinking that they might appreciate the data. I pointed out that some of the stores with the very high productivity might be sacrificing speed for accuracy and the remaining stores may need some additional training. I said I would be addressing with my personnel and thought it might be effective for them to address with theirs for a double sided attack. The email was very much in the spirit of partnership.
I CC'd both my bosses and got a call almost instantly from one of them, telling me as we were above the 85% minimum to not rock the boat.
Aaargh. Really? No drive to be the best? No drive to better than "just good enough". I guess I'll just start napping on the couch in my office instead of trying to make this a world class operation.
The pay is good for what the gig is but not what I'd like to be making. Typically the people who manage the various branches around the country are guys who have been promoted up from the driver level and are 100% tactical, address only what's in your face type managers. Coming from where I came from, I'm used to having the scope of my responsibilities also including quite a bit more strategic and analytical responsibilities.
Anyway, for this account one of our key metrics is accuracy. Accuracy is driven by a number of factors - loaders and drivers (my employees) and receiving personnel (customer employees) The minimum accuracy required by the customer is 85%. We are currently average between 90-95% week to week.
I did some data compilation and analysis and found a nice and tidy Pareto principle. 20% of the customer locations were responsible for 50% of the accuracy errors. Furthermore, many of the offending locations were at the very top in terms of receiving speed (pieces per hour). I sent a very nice email to the local management (leaving out the corporate management who tend to over-react) thinking that they might appreciate the data. I pointed out that some of the stores with the very high productivity might be sacrificing speed for accuracy and the remaining stores may need some additional training. I said I would be addressing with my personnel and thought it might be effective for them to address with theirs for a double sided attack. The email was very much in the spirit of partnership.
I CC'd both my bosses and got a call almost instantly from one of them, telling me as we were above the 85% minimum to not rock the boat.
Aaargh. Really? No drive to be the best? No drive to better than "just good enough". I guess I'll just start napping on the couch in my office instead of trying to make this a world class operation.
I had a dream that I had tickets to watch SMU football, but couldn't find the stadium and nobody on campus knew where it was. I did, however, land in the school shrinks office where I found myself crying.
