Okay, hang in there – this is a good one!

Most of the time when I’m making the case for the value of team improvement huddles, I focus on the cumulative impact of the hundreds of little savings and gains that employees spot on the job every day.

Sometimes, though, a single, simple idea that seems like a no-brainer turns out to have a surprisingly big bottom-line impact.

Take one that an employee at our client, Duraflex International, came up with recently. The company is the world’s leading producer of professional, competitive diving boards. If you watch the sport in the Olympics, you can be sure the pool is outfitted with Duraflex diving equipment. They have no peer in the industry.

One of their core products is a “short stand” that the boards are attached to, and they ship about 400 per year to various locations around the globe.In the past, the stands were packed in existing heavy-duty cardboard boxes that were used for other purposes. At a routine improvement huddle, a team member suggested they were wasting cardboard because the stand didn’t fit well in the boxes.

So the team created a whole new box design specifically for the short stands – cutting down on the cardboard material and reducing the overall size of the box by about half.

No big deal, right? Look at these numbers, and you be the judge:

• Cost of cardboard material – cut by $200 per stand x 400 = $80,000

• Cost of shipping – cut by $59 per stand x 400 = $23,600

That’s more than $100,000 savings PER YEAR straight to the bottom line from one single idea – one that most likely would have never surfaced without their team improvement huddles!

And it doesn’t stop there. Building on that breakthrough, the company has launched a system-wide initiative to explore new packaging options for other products they make.

And it goes on from there. They have a number of team improvement huddles operating on a continuous basis, coming up with lots of ideas for ways to work better … faster … easier … smoother – all the time.

If you want to get your team to “spring” into action with systematic continuous improvement (SCI) …
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