CLAREMORE, Okla. — No matter what your role is in your company, you likely have certain assets, processes, human resources and other items that need your attention daily. This can even be extended to the relationships you manage with customers and vendors.
Each area of responsibility requires a systematic process to keep it on track, hitting the goals and business targets that are needed.
About physical assets, I find it all too common for companies to defer maintenance to hit monthly or quarterly financial targets. The longer this goes on, the more serious the problems will become down the road. Deferred maintenance equals deferred stewardship.
As managers, we are called upon by our shareholders and ownership to be stewards of the assets, processes, people and relationships. When there is a problem, kicking the can down the road for a month (or more) only impacts a future month or quarter. It doesn’t resolve the problem.
Stewardship is defined as “the job of supervising or taking care of something, such as an organization or property.” It’s easy to relate this to a machine or a facility item.
For instance, if a machine blows a bearing, the impact on the operation is immediately noticeable. The cost to repair is generally known; the cost of overtime or other adjustments to overcome that machine being down is generally easy to calculate; and the cost of missed deliveries is easily calculable.
The other impacts that are often not included in the cost of the decision to defer restoring this machine to service are perhaps not so easy to calculate.
Overall production effectiveness suffers as flexibility in your wash alley or production areas is impacted. Safety may be impacted, as workflow must be changed and perhaps alternate machines will be used more. Employee morale will be impacted, especially as your employees may feel that you may not care as you accept shortcuts and negative impacts on the operation, production scheduling and delivery schedules.
Your employees will notice the thought and care you put into maintaining your equipment and facility, along with how you manage processes and people. They will get the message, and you sure want it to be a positive one.
The idea of stewardship of what you have been given in your role as a manager or supervisor can be extended to how you respond to ideas given to you by employees, issues brought up, complaints made, and needs of personnel-related types (insurance questions, PTO questions, etc.).
Taking proper care of your human teams first, along with providing a suitable place for them to spend a third of their time, will help them see that you take your stewardship responsibility seriously.
The Bottom Line & Closing Thought: Deferring attention to business needs, whether they are highly critical or less critical, should be evaluated carefully and not in a vacuum.
Gather your team and discuss, look at the financial as well as non-financial impacts, and ensure that you are communicating to those who may be directly impacted by your decision.At the very least, understand your responsibility to the stewardship of what you have been given charge over as a manager.
In closing, it has been my honor over the past few years to bring you some thoughts and ideas every few months in this column. I hope that there have been some good takeaways that have helped you in your operation. But the further I get into my retirement from the industry (now coming up on two years), I am finding that it is time to turn this column space over to someone else with possibly newer and fresher ideas.
This is my last regular column for American Laundry News, and with that, I wish all of you well, and thanks for reading! Carry on.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
