Smart Business Magazine, November 2020

16 Smart Business November 2020 ON POINT Sanjay Singh Whats wrong The Not Working Right list When you dont get your product out the door on time your customers arent able to produce their product In an extreme case your failure could shut down a customers entire production line Now imagine the prospect of your on time delivery nose diving over the course of 60 days Finally imagine the damage to your companys reputation and credibility in the wake of such a disaster This very thing happened five years ago at Roll Kraft where Singh at the time served as president The memory of this disastrous time is still fresh in my mind today On the surface the challenges that caused our on time delivery issues seemed straightforward Our operations team had a capacity issue and needed either more people or more overtime to get the job done A mentor once told me that The stated problem is never the real problem How true that was for us The corrective action process was grueling and filled with tension anxiety insecurity and too much ego It took us about 90 days to identify the real issues and put the corrective actions in place Even then several corrective actions had to be re evaluated when the issues did not go away While we tried to determine root causes asking successively deeper why questions to understand what was wrong we needed something more to turn these insights into action Our need for a problem solving system led us to develop what we call the Not Working Right list Rather than create an acronym or complex jargon Not Working Right is relatable commonsense and nonjudgmental You do not have to overthink whats not working right It creates a sense of urgency among the team to solve the problem right now After all if we are going to admit that something is not working right or being neglected isnt it our responsibility to fix it as quickly as possible The Not Working Right list is a list of issues compiled by every functional leader on the management team These are items that need to be addressed as soon as possible Recent examples from the Not Working Right list include a low frequency of sales associate visits to customers lower than expected orders for new products or an employee turnover rate that has become too high The issues once identified have to be solved within a given timeline typically within 90 days The discipline of identifying and then defining the real not stated problems every Monday and then solving them over the course of the week has enabled the company to be both focused and agile It would have been hard to significantly scale the company over the last few years had we not added this tool to our arsenal The effectiveness of this process lies in identifying the issues that need to be resolved immediately This effort requires a willingness to dig into the details and that wont always be easy But as the proverb goes Success is sweet but usually has the scent of sweat Sanjay Singh Executive chairman of the board of directors Mace Security International Mace Security is the manufacturer of the famous Mace brand pepper spray headquartered in Cleveland Ohio ssingh@ mace com