Dear Followers,
I’m pleased to announce that on October 11th, we hosted our company- wide innovation competition grand prize announcement. It was a fabulous event, in celebration of a three- month long staff focused innovation campaign.
During this initiative, five separate teams made up of staff from all of our departments including Production, HR and Finance were tasked with the objective of finding ways to improve our company processes. A focus was to be placed on developing ideas that would enhance the quality of our drawings, improve our customer service, and accelerate our client schedules.
The results were profoundly successful, and I would like to personally thank each and every one of our staff members that made this event such a success. Every team delivered a thorough and thought- provoking presentation, with many exceptionally good ideas.
In total the teams came up with 28 ideas ranging from production improvements, to new training methods, to new financial systems. Unfortunately, I cannot share these ideas in detail with our social media platform as our competitors would be very interested…… but I can highlight a few. ?
On the training side, one team developed a new and upgraded set of training modules to accommodate the software upgrades by Tekla, an advanced component training module, and a unique idea for sharing Tekla best practices between staff members.
Another team developed a sophisticated client communication platform which integrates RFI’s between the model, the client and the design team for real time collaboration.
One team prepared a system for close collaboration of tasks between each department to streamline communication and reduce downtime. This same team also came up with a drawing editing revision which will most certainly improve the quality of our shop drawings.
In the near term we plan to implement 8 of the submitted ideas, and in the longer term another 10 will be incorporated once the first- round implementation is complete.
With respect to the winning team for the competition, the judging committee faced a very difficult decision. All of the submissions were excellent, and many ideas had a lot of merit and were implementable. After a week of deliberations, we finally decided that the winning team was “Team USA” lead by Bart and Jeremy. Great job, team!
A great big thank you to all of the teams and their hard work, and I am very confident that in the near future all of our clients will start to see the positive effects that this innovation campaign will have on the quality of our drawings and our customer service.
Thank you,
Cliff Young – VP