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How Alcan Rolled Products, Through Workculture Change, Created A Supply Chain Reaction:
Re-Defining How Empowerment Happens

Sherrie Ford, Ph.D.
Principal, Change Partners, LLC
Athens, Georgia USA


WORKCULTURE: THE HIDDEN CONSTRAINT, THE HIDDEN SUPPLY CHAIN LINK
Our work has revealed that there is a manufacturing constraint in what we call "workculture", defined at length below. The example of Alcan Rolled Products – the focus of this white paper – demonstrates that identifying a plant's workculture as the pre-eminent constraint was the shrewdest breakthrough in their thinking, in facing extraordinary challenges ten years ago in the aluminium recycling industry. In pursuing the constraint of workculture, not only has their external supply chain been directly impacted by the workculture change in the single plant in Greensboro, Georgia; their internal, plant to plant supply chain has also been impacted, quite unexpectedly and positively. It involves three kinds of recycled ingot in a critical balance, which, if unbalanced, can lead to plant shutdowns and costly logistics consequences in a market whose value on aluminium can often be quite volatile.

THE MEANING OF WORKCULTURE
A KEY BUT ILLUSIVE CONCEPT
One concept is central to this white paper: it has to do with what we have come, in recent years, to call "workculture." We continue to seek a better term, because the problem with this one is that most people, when they talk about work, even in a small business or factory, have a tendency to think of "workforce" or "workculture" as referring to only to
  • Workers
  • Blue collar
  • Labourers
  • The shop floor
  • The ones who threaten to go on strike
  • The ones someone has to "romance' into caring about productivity, quality, efficiency, safety.
Management is typically not included in the scope of this word.

It seems that there is still a prevalent notion after all these years of empowerment, even if an unconscious one, that separates 'thinking' from 'doing,' or 'working.' Workers 'do' and managers 'think,' 'plan,' 'analyse,' and in general, decide what workers 'do.' Indeed, in reality, for more factories than care to admit it, this tendency to segregate mental and physical tasks continues, despite what has been going on for at least twenty years now in shifting more 'thinking' to the blue collar level and more 'doing' in the white.

The costly result of this unexamined tendency is that everyone involved obscures the power of this thing that needs a name, because without realising it, everyone takes false steps toward thinking about how to deal with:
  • Day-to-day issues at a given plant
  • Issues that arise when a crisis hits
  • The sudden need to change
"Everyone" means union leaders, hourly employees, middle management, top management, top manager. On these occasions, whether in management or among the hourly ranks, people tend to mentally detach from the whole and to segregate themselves, as if they were, by being in management or being an hourly wage roll employee, somehow separate elements. Imagine their frustrations as they seek a path to manage, measure, or change one another.

However, we have to use something to talk about phenomena at work that we have all experienced but which leave us at a loss to explain. What is it about certain places of work that leaves people feeling empty at the end of the day, regardless of the merits of product or service created? What is it about other places that leave them thrilled to be associated with it, even if they aren't paid much or if they sacrifice their health or general well-being to go on being a part of it? What is it that makes some factories cling to the ways of the past? What is it that prompts some factories to try anything, once? Why do some factories laugh off the "new-plant-manager-every-other year" syndrome - and continue to out-produce their competitors - while others never seem to get over the grief of a leader lost long ago?

What is it that makes a 30+ year-old factory with obsolete equipment and an essentially uneducated hourly population –not even a GED - outperform a brand new sister plant only a seven-hour drive away, with state-of-the art technology and entry-level hiring requirements of a two-year technical, post-high school degree? You cannot chalk it up to geography, because factories in the same locale perform radically differently. You cannot call it "corporate management", because factories in the same corporation perform radically differently, even in the same geographic area.

It is impossible to explain these phenomena by using the 'thinker' versus 'doer' frame of thinking. We need a term that encompasses both, or all. Workculture as a term has its risks, but it is what we use to refer to the entire employee base, everyone who draws a paycheck, at a specific factory site, as opposed to a company's division office or its other sister plants. It includes all levels of employee, from management to hourly, full-time and part-time. In addition to encompassing all who work in the organization, other features of the word 'workculture' include:
  • Being permeable and changeable, though it feels rigid and fixed
  • Affecting the attitude of a factory's workforce in just doing the job, as well as embracing new ways of doing it
  • Affecting employees' willingness to put discretionary time and effort into the well-being of the business
  • Affecting their on-going sense of commitment in the course of the workday to leave it a more competitive place than when they showed up
  • Giving an inner sense of "how we do things here,' though not written down
  • Causing the illusion that "things never change around here," though to the outside eye - or to someone returning after many years away - things are constantly changing; nothing seems the same
  • Being full of contradictions rarely deliberately exposed
  • Masking the fundamental fact that everyone actually shares surprisingly similar beliefs about how to survive change or perform at greater levels.
Unless an outsider should systematically inquire all employees about their past and about what they think the future holds and what should be done differently to handle expected changes, managers and hourly workers claim to be in opposition on practically every issue. Likewise, disparate elements in a workculture tend to take all the pride and credit for the site's survival over the years, giving a generous but mainly courteous nod of the head to the other elements. But it clearly has to be the whole workculture that has either managed survival or failed to adapt. This observation is continually reinforced in the work that my partner and I have participated on well over 50 occasions, Alcan Rolled Products with recycling factories in Athens, Georgia and Berea, Kentucky, being one excellent example.

"HARD SKILLS VERSUS SOFT SKILLS" AND "US VERSUS THEM" - STILL THE FRAMEWORK
Before focusing on Alcan Rolled Products, consider a couple of other false assumptions associated with workculture. Going by what leaders at the factory level increasingly dwell on these days, we conclude that we are in the midst of one of the great debates in manufacturing management. Those in a workculture with titles and job descriptions that suggest that they alone are responsible for the success of the plant are typically the plant manager and his or her direct reports. Increasingly you hear their conversations about productivity turn to handy opposition of "hard skills" versus "soft skills" in trying to determine performance strategies. And most, having attempted to lead many an operations revolution that went nowhere, or not as far as it needed to go, the consistent conclusion they come to is that "It's the people stuff that really counts," with the inference that "and we do not do well with the soft skills." It seems to have had something to do with "the people" that caused a strategy (or career) to fail. Oftentimes this conversation focuses on how they as individuals could somehow be better leaders, better at the soft stuff. They do not question the validity of seeing their role as plant manager something separate from the workculture as a whole – they are blind to the pitfalls of thinking of themselves as a detached element. They think that the single function of plant manager and his or her abilities as a leader qualifies as the root cause of failure in these hapless strategies.

On the shop floor, the vocabulary may differ, you might not hear "hard skills" versus "soft skills," but the dialog is often much the same and often with the same conclusion: we don't have a good leader (or they reminisce about good leaders that have moved on). Same false step.

WORKCULTURE ISSUES ARE CRITICAL, BUT THEY ARE NOT ABOUT HARD VERSUS SOFT OR US VERSUS THEM
How do you talk and think about local factories successfully competing in world markets—therefore factories embracing change and radically improving their performance-- without falling into either the trap of Hard versus Soft skills or of Us versus Them or of the Thinkers versus the Doers? Do these things impact a factory's survival, or is dealing with them just a nuisance part of life that some are good at and some are not?

Whether said aloud or not, this is a question asked both by those with management titles and those without them and with more frequency as these tumultuous times increase the need to know the answer. Plant managers and shop floor, back office and front all know too well that these things do indeed have tremendous impact, just by the fatigue factor they feel at the end of the day. Struggle is everywhere: struggle with aligning management staffs, struggle with the impracticality of keeping true to the open door policy, struggle with grievances, mediations, negotiations. "We'll never meet our goals with all this 'attitude'!" (And whom do you picture saying this, management or hourly?)

It is rare that leaders, either plant managers or elected union officials, or the un-elected but well-known leaders from the ranks face critical change issues with knowledge or skill in seeing workculture as an integration of elements, all levels, all functions. We have done quite a bit of workculture research in the last ten years and certainly stay abreast of the literature on the topic of management and change management. Our observation is that plant managers (to single out one element of workculture) have paid a high degree of attention to and worked extremely hard toward understanding every aspect of their mission to make quality product, on time and at low cost, EXCEPT the aspect of the workculture.

As you might expect, we have the opportunity to work with the workculture of the factory pretty much exclusively at the invitation of someone in management—we have never been invited by any other element. Early on we try to give all of the "designated leaders"—whether plant managers and, in union shops, union leadership, at least the awareness that there is a false element in the debate going on about Hard Skills and Soft Skills. We offer the chance for them to see that they can, if they choose, understand the success of the factory from an alternative perspective than focusing so ferociously on productivity, processes or a union's agenda. When given this choice, most decline the opportunity to emphasize workculture. They leave it as a by-product of what they consider more important things to think about. Lean production methods, for example, in the view of some, will lead to the kind of workculture needed to pump up competitiveness. They go on to lead lean production initiatives that get quickly to great business results and they acquire the impression that the workculture has changed in a lasting way. But it has not—if anything, shop floors are becoming contemptuous of lean production methods and, post facto, the workculture is pretty much the same as it was before dabbling in them. And by the way, the business results go back to pre-lean levels, or sometimes, worse.

Or, something else regarded as a more important thing to think about is often the interpretation of a rule book, or how to come out ahead in a union negotiation, or how to engineer labor contracts that focus narrowly and in hair-splitting ways on one part of the workculture's welfare. Thus, on the surface and for a long, long time, workcultures in factories appear divided into elements of distinctly different politics, if you will, despite the fact that if you stop there, you haven't explained anything about how a factory ultimately succeeds or fails.

A NEW HISTORY OF FACTORY LIFE
Without going into the story of how we learned to peel back the veneer of the divided factory workculture, we have discovered that a startling and profound unity does emerge. It is consistently found to be a characteristic in any given workculture If you engage everyone in the organization, in small groups of mixed levels and functions, then this unity gradually emerges from beneath that surface of conflict, like buried treasure from the bottom of a very deep ocean. Ask these questions:
  • What changes has this plant been through since you have been here?
  • What changes, therefore do you expect in the next few years (related to customers, suppliers, technology, cost of doing business, etc, etc)?
  • Do you have the workculture needed to survive changes expected?
  • What does 'workculture' mean?
  • If you do not have the one you need, what would you change in order to have it?
Partway through this four-hour process of inquiry, through observing both the verbal and non-verbal behaviour, an outside party unfamiliar with what's going on might walk out concluding that the great conflict of Us versus Them must indeed be an innate characteristic of people at work. Manager and managed exhibit and seemed to be defined by, the walls they project to be between them. It is not until later steps in the process which prompt each person to participate in sorting out all the changes they've come up with (sometimes in sarcastic language, still leaning against that wall) that a new insight about the whole culture begins to appear, as behaviours begin to shift:
  • First they must silently put all of their ideas, written on dozens, sometimes hundreds of small cards, into piles of cards with like meanings – no talking or debating, just moving cards from pile to pile until a tacit meaning is understood by everyone.
  • Next, they discuss and debate to consensus what to name each pile of cards
  • Finally, they are asked and encouraged to debate at great length, in all possible pairings of these labels, 'which influences the other more?'
Because of this final step, they discover a totally shared view of the issues related to surviving and dominating the competition in the coming years. Moreover, they agree unanimously on which issue to focus on first, next, then next, until all of the issues will be resolved, including the inevitable label and one greatly feared by management: "More Wages and Benefits."

At the beginning of this inquiry process, management and hourly each harbor some erroneous beliefs about one another, as shown by how they initially project the outcome of this questioning process. Each, likewise, acknowledges startling surprise at finding almost down to the last issue a complete consistency by all in naming the issues and the order in which to address them, even in identifying who will be accountable for what. Much of these outcomes at first glance in the questioning process defy intuition, yet, with Alcan Rolled Products, we see ten consecutive years of demonstrating the power of these revelations.

In virtually every case, surprising in itself in some ways, the first three driving issues inevitably wind up being some combination of "Management," "Communication" and "Training." The resulting issues are always less predictable and far more varied, depending on the type of product and processes involved, but one typically sees excellence in "Quality," "Productivity," "Efficiencies," "Machine Uptime," "Teamwork," "Wages and Benefits" – clearly all features that every factory workculture covets in the world class manufacturing era. However, as predictable as the first driving three issues are in label, they are never identical in meaning from company to company or even session to session in the questioning process. Though tempted to do so, you cannot generalize results meaningfully beyond the workculture of any one factory.

What then accounts for that quirkiness in any given workculture? If they all identify similar driving issues, wouldn't it be easy to say we've cracked the code to understanding all other workcultures regardless of whether they go through this process or not? We wondered the same thing and have been tempted to simply by-pass the time-consuming effort to take 100% of a factory's employees off-line to go through the inquiry process.

But what we have learned is that to generalize based on repeated outcomes in every instance of using this process deprives a workculture of two critical awakenings:
  1. The unmasking of the profound unity which all come to agree is there
  2. Becoming conscious of legacy systems that have evolved over time.
What are legacy systems? At last, we have begun to find some answers to the questions posed earlier, as to why workcultures seem to be so very different, even among factories in the same town or parts of the same corporate entity. Despite the fact that we can predict almost any factory's Order of Operations for culture change, we can never predict legacy systems.

We use the term 'legacy system' – borrowed from the world of information sciences – to refer to inconsistencies in the workculture, the mixed messages that subtly undercut (or subtly support) the mission of the plant. We see a parallel between the way an installed base of software / hardware users undergoes seemingly strong forces of resistance whenever upgrades are forced upon them and the resistance to change in factories in management and hourly alike when faced with new situations. Habits and beliefs in a factory workculture seem to have hardened at a time long past when the mission was quite different and they continue to influence outcomes in today's mission, even influencing employees who have only recently come to work.

A few examples:
  • A pharmaceuticals company hardened to distrust customers because they might press for shortcuts to get around FDA approvals; yet world class mandates require that you put the customer first above all other considerations
  • A fiberglass company out-producing annual performance levels for seventeen years; yet claiming that things never change
  • Same company resoundingly concurring that 'dirt road talks' of the start up days were quintessentially great communication forums; yet when offered to go back to that method of communication, agreeing that they would not want to do so
  • A woods products company almost banging their fists on the table demanding respect; yet behaviour showing little understanding of what respect looks like.
These are just a few vignettes that, if collected carefully and held up to the workculture, bring out awareness that habits and beliefs need to be updated.

THE EXAMPLE OF ALCAN ROLLED PRODUCTS
On April 23, 2000, a news article appeared in the Athens Daily News & Banner Herald with this headline: "Greensboro Alcan Site Recycling Plenty of Cans." With understatement in this headline typical of small town journalism, the text goes on to read:
Cleveland, Ohio-based Alcan recently announced that its Greensboro recycling plant recycled 6.3 billion aluminium beverage cans in 1999 – the equivalent of 23 aluminium cans for every person in the United States.
The company estimated that the economic value of the aluminium cans recycled by Alcan-Greensboro in 1999 totalled about $95 million.
The Greensboro plant contributed a little more than 30 percent of the total recycling of aluminium for Alcan's three recycling facilities. The company's overall record of 21.6 billion aluminium beverage cans recycled in 1999 was an increase of 7.5 percent from the previous year.
Earlier in this essay I asked the question, "What is it that makes a 30+ year old factory with obsolete equipment and an essentially uneducated hourly population out-perform a brand new sister plant only seven-hour drive away with state-of-the-art technology and entry-level hiring requirements of a two-year technical, post-high school degree?" The Alcan-Greensboro plant is the one I had in mind. The sister plant, the brand new one built with the latest furnace technology and with a plant layout ideal for a team-based management philosophy, is Alcan-Berea, which for its first decade performed at significantly lower levels than did Greensboro. What is so different about Greensboro?

THE WORKCULTURE AT ALCAN, GREENSBORO UNDERGOES THE INQUIRY PROCESS
Of the three types of recycled aluminium that relate to beverage cans, Alcan-Greensboro produces ingot for 'body stock'. It produced 135 million pounds of ingot in 1988 with equipment that had not even been designed for aluminium recycling, a telling feature of the workculture twelve years ago and one of its abiding legacy systems. That is, despite a generally low level of formal education, the plant has developed ways around conventional engineering solutions and has often produced superior results without professional engineering staff. Bob Harris, the plant manager at this site since 1989, is unique in many ways, primarily because he has resisted the temptation to divide the workculture into Us versus Them, or to make decisions in isolation. He came from the shop floor himself, in past times a machinist, even a one-time union member, before circumstance brought him into management. Prior to Harris' coming on board, the management had pretty consistently been autocratic, traditional, top-down and hierarchical, one prone to working "harder, not smarter," in contrast to what the workculture repeatedly demonstrated it was capable of doing.

It has been Harris' characteristic when new to a site to seek out anyone at any level ready to make quantum leaps. Whoever has said "Yes", he has empowered to take charge of change projects. For the most part, he has found that the top management team members tend to say, "I don't think it can be done," and that front-line supervisors tend to be comfortable with status quo. However, he rarely has found operators unwilling or unable to take on the problem solving associated with overcoming hurdles, regardless of education or experience. Combining Harris as top management, with his open thinking, with an inventive workculture seemingly unaware that they were not schooled to produce such technical prowess, the Greensboro plant was on the brink of nearly a decade of exceptional performance.


However by 1995, the improvement levels, which had been extraordinary enough in themselves, given the outdated technology they had to work with, had tapered off. See "History of Productivity" graph below. Harris decided to have the inquiry process conducted in September 1995 and again four years later in May 1999. The findings in 1995 were responded to systematically by the workculture so effectively that four years later, the plant discovered that they had accomplished 66% of what they had set out to do. Namely, they managed to reform practices in 'Management,' 'Communication' and 'Training,' which they had determined as the constraints to the goals of 'Teamwork', 'Working Conditions,' 'Safety,' 'Quality and 'Higher Wages.' They also found that all of their "predictions" in 1995 came true about what would result if the constraints were removed. Namely, they were able to exceed every customer demand with lower cost and greater efficiency, in turn leading to greater personal income and job security:

Above is the Matrix of Influences for 1995, showing how each of five sessions labelled dozens of cards of specific changes an employee would make. The first three influences represent the constraint to success in the remaining four to seven influences on achieving the ideal, competitive workculture.

Responses to the 1995 inquiry process led to the following strategic changes called for by the culture:
  • Gradual elimination of supervisors
  • Increased training in problem-solving and decision-making for the shop floor
  • Re-organization into business units (BUMS = business unit managers)
  • Embarking on and achieving ISO 9000 registration (and later, QS 9000)
  • Comprehensive Safety Systems program
  • Mastering the control plan concept whereby business units could eliminate non-value-added steps in:
    • De-coating used beverage cans
    • Melting cans in the furnaces
    • Pouring molten aluminium into 60,000-ton ingots with a high degree of recovery of pure aluminium.
Below is the Matrix of Influences for 1999, showing how each of eight sessions labelled dozens of cards of specific changes an employee would now make, five years later:

WORKCULTURE CONSTRAINT REMOVED AND PERFORMANCE SKYROCKETS

The culture foretold in 1995 that effective resolution of unique meanings of the labels "Management", "Communication," and "Training" would lead to "Better Working Conditions," "Teamwork," "Quality," "Safety," "Money," and "Attitude and Morale." That happened, as shown in these exceptional results:
  1. Production increase of 247%
  2. Productivity increase of 192%
  3. Unit cost reduction of 13%
  4. Energy reduction of 17%
  5. Five years without a lost time accident (1994 – 1999).
In conducting the process again in 1999, the plant discovered the following outcomes regarding its constraints as a workculture, which explains such things as how they achieved production increases of 247%, from 135 million pounds per year in 1988 to 350 million pounds in 1999.

DRIVING INFLUENCES – THE 1995 CONSTRAINT: WHAT CHANGED THAT WAS DESIRED
  • Continued support for employee involvement from Bob and leadership team has occurred
  • Housekeeping has improved overall
  • Continued emphasis on safety has been felt by all
  • More decisions now made at the appropriate point (hourly)
  • Rotating shift schedules are gone
  • Employee involvement in most operational issues permeates the organization
  • Significant hours of training every year have been presented: QS9000, VPP safety, meeting management, control plan maintenance
  • Two levels of management structure between plant manager and employee are gone
  • Shared (between hourly and salaried) decision making has increased dramatically
  • Planning with involvement has become more proactive
  • Hourly business knowledge and understanding have improved greatly
  • Job specific skills of hourly have improved through cross training
  • Awareness has increased for environmental issues
  • Equipment has been improved and capacity enhanced.
DRIVING INFLUENCES - THE 1995 CONSTRAINT: WHAT CHANGED THAT WAS NOT DESIRED
  • None.
DRIVING INFLUENCES-- THE 1995 CONSTRAINT: WHAT DID NOT CHANGE THAT WAS DESIRED
  • Management is still viewed as non-value-adding
  • Roles are still unclear for management and hourly
  • Ability to approach management other than Bob openly is still not felt
  • Accomplishments are not recognised often enough
  • Meetings are still scheduled on off days
  • Hourly input given during meetings, especially control plan, is still not taken into account and valued
  • Management is still not believed to have necessary understanding and / or appreciation for jobs and process
  • Follow through by management on ideas is still not seen as occurring consistently
  • Management still seen as operating under different set of rules
RESULTING INFLUENCES— WORLD CLASS MANUFACTURING: WHAT CHANGED THAT WAS DESIRED
  • Business results as relates to ingot production, safety (LTA recordables) and conversion cost have steadily improved
  • Wages have steadily climbed
  • Trust among team members is stronger
  • Willingness to embrace change is overwhelmingly strong
  • Safety has been instilled as a priority and results have improved accordingly
  • Production cycle times have improved
  • Conversion cost have decreased steadily
  • More customer (Logan) interaction occurs today
  • Process automation as a way to improve working conditions has occurred
  • Incoming raw material scrap quality has improved
  • Railroad no longer holding the plant hostage!—switch to truck transport
  • Existing equipment improved and new equipment installed
  • Uniforms improved from safety perspective>
  • Teamwork has improved and self-direction increased
  • "We should do what is best for the business" is increasingly heard as the starting point for making decisions.
RESULTING INFLUENCES - WORLD CLASS MANUFACTURING: WHAT CHANGED THAT WAS NOT DESIRED
  • Variable compensation fell continually
  • Morale, especially recently, has eroded
  • Lack of equity between effort and reward.
RESULTING INFLUENCES - WORLD CLASS MANUFACTURING: WHAT DID NOT CHANGE THAT WAS DESIRED
  • The point system is still viewed as an unnecessary punishment, no value
  • No significant impact appears on Quality, according to the Logan scorecard
  • There was a jump in total operating costs every year (which the culture predicted).
Examples of their continued legacy system of on-going innovation despite lack of formal engineering training include:
  • New melting furnace developed by collaboration among Canadian labs, management and shop floor personnel to create a submergence device. This device enabled their furnaces to increase throughput to 3,300 pounds per hour. Subsequently, a sister plant, disregarding this breakthrough perhaps because of its origins, put in two new furnaces without this device and wound up with only 1,800 pounds per hour. The Greensboro innovation has now become an industry standard
  • Operators were challenged to find a more environmentally friendly flux than the chlorine flux traditionally used to remove impurities in the melting process. They pioneered the salt flux which in three years became the industry standard
  • Operators were challenged to reduce the time it takes to conduct the annual re-builds of the furnace. They pioneered a lining for the furnace that drops into place, eliminating two days from the process.
SUPPLY CHAIN ENHANCED
At the beginning I mentioned that the cause-effect at work here, identifying workculture as a production constraint, then working to develop a systematic response to the workculture's driving influences, that the supply chain also plays a prominent role in the story. Though not expanded upon in this presentation, let me conclude these remarks by noting the following:
  • A supplier to Alcan Rolled Products of smelting of its aluminium dross, Smelter Service Corporation in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, found that it too was beginning to face the shock waves of being in a global market. The highest of standards of quality and productivity will force out any weak links in the supply chain. Bob Harris suggested that the owner take his plant through the inquiry process, to discover its own workculture constraints, as a means of re-inventing itself and positioning itself to become a greater link in the Alcan chain.
  • An Alcan Rolled Products sister plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, had never quite got off the ground in shifting from melting for the mom and pop junk metal shops to cost effectively shipping a higher grade (Class One) of aluminium. Six months after the inquiry process was conducted there, performance exceeded all previous levels, despite an ineffectual plant manager. His failure to sustain the strategies called for by the culture as a whole led to selling this plant.
  • In 1999, owing to his extraordinary record at the Greensboro plant, Bob Harris was named plant manager over a second plant, the "rival" Berea plant. The inquiry process was conducted there, identifying 'New and Altered Equipment' as a significant constraint, along with 'Management' and 'Communication.' Focused strategies brought that plant within six months to production levels 30 to 50% higher than it had ever been, which have been sustained. These two plants make up the majority of body stock ingot for Alcan Rolled Products.
  • Most significantly of all, because of Greensboro's breaking of its workculture constraint, is the following announcement in February 2000. The two plants, Greensboro and Berea, had produced over 700 million pounds between them, with no capital investment whatsoever. Plans were made to achieve a billion pounds, exceeding what corporate earlier in the budget year refused to put in the forecast because they considered it unachievable. This amount of quality ingot produced within the company meant that they no longer had to buy additional ingot from third parties in order to make up for shortages. Moreover, these two plants were sufficient to supply the Alcan rolling mill in Logan, Kentucky, which allows a new mix for the rolling facilities and thereby positively impacting the Warren, Ohio plant by focusing on coating end stock. Thus, a small, rural, unsophisticated melting operation in the Deep South, through changing its workculture and discovering the power of its legacy systems, has affected its parent company and at least one supplier. It has done so in ways that suggest they will never be the same and in ways that have led them closer to the ideals of 'world class manufacturing'.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Sherrie L Ford has been in organizational consulting for the past eleven years. In 1991, as Vice President of Business and Industry Services, she founded the Center for Continuous Improvement at Athens Tech, in Athens, Georgia. Twenty-three companies in the north Georgia area each gave $10,000 to fund the Center's start-up. Its mission was to develop leadership and vision at all levels in an organization, particularly in the lean production environment.

Local manufacturing successes led the Centre staff and its "tag team" of consultants to division-level development, improving on strategic assessment and planning practices in each case. When she left the tech school system in 1996, she had built a client base of over 150 organizations, both manufacturing and service sector.

She formed a new company, Change Partners, LLC, in 1996. Manufacturing clients include ABB Power T & D, Alcan Rolled Products, American Dehydrated Foods, BICC General, Blue Ridge Paper, CertainTeed, Chipman-Union, Inc, ConAgra, Dade-Behring, Dana Corporation, Denon Digital Industries, Fibervisions, Fire Arms Training Systems (FATS), Georgia Pacific, Harris Calorific, Hartwell Sports, Johnson & Johnson, Lone Star Industries, Inc, Masterack, Merial, Ltd., NACOM, Noramco, Smelter Service Corporation, Standridge Color, TrusJoist Weyerhauser, Tyco Health Care and Welch's Foods. Service clients include Athens Regional Medical Center, Exploration Resources, Gwinnett County Coalition, Georgia Department of Human Resources / Rehabilitation Services, the Holiday Inn, the University of Georgia, US Army Corps of Engineers and Walton Electrical Membership Co-operative.

Publications include:
  • A chapter in a casebook (LSU Press, 1995) entitled "Reliance Electric: A Workculture Renaissance"
  • "Economic Development through Quality Improvement," in Economic Development Review, Winter, 1997
  • An article "Competition May Be Global, But All Quality Is Local," in Target: Innovation at Work, December 1996
  • "High Velocity Change: Energised for Excellence at Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics-America," in Target: Innovation at Work, September 1997.
Her work was featured in IndustryWeek, January 1997, in an article by John Sheridan entitled "Nurturing World Class Solutions". She contributed to a white paper on workculture change sponsored by IndustryWeek and a guest column "On Leadership" appeared in June, 1999, in IndustryWeek: Growing Companies.

She broadcast a six month series for Georgia Public Radio in 1995 entitled, "Take This Job and Love It," chronicling the transformation of traditional workcultures in north Georgia toward team-based high performance.

She is a frequent presenter for APICS, Summer Workshops and International Conferences and Inc. Magazine and is the President of the Southeastern Region for the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME). She was named to the first board of examiners for Georgia's Oglethorpe Award, modelled on the Malcolm Baldrige Award and is one of four external judges for IndustryWeek's Best Plants Award, 1998 – present.

She received her PhD from the University of Georgia in 1982 and was named to Phi Beta Kappa that same year.

She can be reached at 706-546-4045 or at sherrieford@change partners.com

  1. General Education Diploma – earned outside of a high school setting by those who have dropped out of formal schooling.
  2. This outcome we derive from what we call the "Order of Operations for Effective Workculture Change," echoing the mathematical phrase for the proper order for the operations of 'multiply,' 'divide,' 'add,' 'subtract' to arrive at the correct answer in solving equations.
  3. Either these exact labels or synonyms, such as "White Hats" for "Management".
  4. The three types include body stock, coated end stock, and tab stock referring aluminium grade alloy for the body of the can, different from that needed for the and the top (coated end) of the can and the pull tabs.
  5. Greensboro, Georgia, is a town in a rural county in Georgia, until recent lake resort development, one of the poorest, with one of the state's highest high school drop out rates.
  6. The cards beneath each of these labels reflect the 'world class agenda' that shop floor employees are rarely given credit for supporting pro-actively. Sample cards for "Working Conditions' are Better Ways of Controlling Waste and Cleaner Work Place. They do not use words like Kaizen Blitz or Five Ss, but they seek the same result. Practices in Management, Communication and Training were identified as the constraints to having the world class agenda – in the terminology of the workculture – unfold.