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“Part of controlling the WIP is also figuring out how to significantly reduce the day-to-day, hour-by-hour multitasking. And how do you do that? Simple. You start a task and you complete it before you move on.” —Goldratt's Rules of Flow
“To be unclear is to be unkind.“ -Dave Ramsey
“94% of problems in business are systems-driven and only 6% are people driven.” - W. Edwards Deming
“Things must function first and foremost.” - Walter Gropius
“As organizations grow, complexity is the norm. Simplicity must be an intentional act.” -Carey Nieuwhof
Welcome to the Axis Of Awesome (the closest thing to a Silver Bullet that I am aware of). Let’s move your company from Owner Dependent to System Dependent.
If there is one thing holding many custom cabinet manufacturers back, it is their inability to SCALE their business, and I know of no better way to prepare to scale your business than to bring your A-game to your Marketing and Sales efforts, which many have been able to do, but then stumble or fail because Operations was not able to manufacture what was sold (for some, this has become a vicious cycle). To prepare for Sales growth, you must get your Operations in a position to be able to handle the sales, you must match Operations to Sales, and keep them matched indefinitely, or both will suffer.
Adding Procedures to a Room or group of Rooms provides templated Step-by-Step Standard Operating Procedures to walk team members through the process of creating a Ballpark Estimate, Estimating a job in Custom Cabinet Estimator, Designing a job in KCD, Ordering Cabinotch component parts, ordering Conestoga doors, trim and molding using Con-Nex, and most of the manufacturing Procedures involved in producing cabinetry, as well as Delivery and Installation. Getting these Procedures in place BEFORE you step up your Marketing and Sales efforts is key to successfully SCALING your business.
It has been calculated that a process that takes 10 minutes for a trained/skilled person to do will require 30 times that amount of time to train a new team member to do (300 minutes/5 hours). It only makes sense to try and minimize the training time, and make as much of that time self-directed as possible, thus these Procedures need to be as descriptive as possible (step-by-step), and as comprehensive as required for success (but not overly complicated), and as always, an image is worth a thousand words, which must also mean a video is worth a million words.
Procedures are NOT just for new Team Members, they are for any Team Member that needs a quick review, or refresher on a process they do seldom (a Second Brain), or need to know a position, dimension, sequence, etc. THESE context sensitive Procedures provide a bread crumb trail of what happened and when it happened, and how long it took to happen (the pot of gold at the end of the data rainbow).
Procedures are considered Technical Writing, which is unlike most other writing we do, so use the framework laid out in these Procedures, which should be Categorized by the sequence of events required to manufacture cabinetry, then grouped by logical steps, then broken down into 3 categories of Setup (what you need to do to get ready to do the work), Process (doing the work), and Maintenance (what needs to be done to complete the Process before moving to the next step or transfer batch).
A Project needs to exist before you can utilize Procedures, so from the Project page, you should work through creating the Project, the Project Data, then add any Rooms, which will include a button to add the Procedures for that Room.
These Procedures can be handles in at least two ways, and probably many more if we use our imaginations.
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