Page 117 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

98 The Disney Way

The adoption of the team system has made a concrete difference at Lensing,
in its relations not only with suppliers and customers but also with employees,
who now feel empowered to voice their opinions when they believe that a pro-
cess can be changed for the better.
One of the managers, Donnie Montgomery, started his career at Lensing
by working as a handler for one of the company’s products, Pella Windows.
Recognizing this warehouse worker’s potential, his supervisor, Mike O’Donohue,
proposed him for the manager’s job when the previous manager left. Mike ini-
tially had a difficult time persuading the company president that Donnie was
up to the task. It was, after all, a big jump from handler to manager. But Mike’s
foresight proved to be absolutely on target.
We met Donnie when the company sent him to us for training as a team
leader. It seems that not only had he performed superbly on a day-to-day basis,
but also working in a team setting had encouraged him to develop an innovative
new trucking schedule. It was this initiative that had so impressed management.
Illinois Power, another of our clients that adopted a team-based struc-
ture, also has witnessed results worth noting. After the utility executives
decided to introduce total quality management, we helped to set up some
475 teams that brought more than 80 percent of the workforce into the
decision-making process. The ideas that emerged from these teams played
a significant part in the changed management effort. The teams submitted
more than 2,500 suggestions to save money or increase revenue, which,
when implemented, produced net savings of more than $18 million per year!
Teams also came up with nearly 3,000 ideas for improving the work process
or customer service.
Teams have taken on very specific functions at the Mead Johnson
Nutritional Division of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Initially, 55 teams were orga-
nized, of which 7 were process teams, 10 dealt with issues, 32 were natural
work groups, 5 were set up as steering teams, and 1 was to be a catchall for
any special issues that came up.
At the start, the unit known as the Track Team established its purpose
and its goals: “Our mission is to improve the cycle time involved with trac-
ing and expediting, to increase the quality of the response, and to assure our
customers that Mead Johnson provides a reliable service.”
Tracing and expediting were handled by different departments, so the
team began its work by making flow charts of the process used in dealing
with customers’ orders. The team discovered that the company had received
2,267 requests to trace an order in the previous year, and that each request