Optimize Your Company’s Productivity and Safety
The challenge for balancing productivity and safety exists for all industries but especially in the tree care industry where there are many variables that impact both. Tree care companies experience costs related to incidences involving damage to their own property and/or that of the client as well as employee injuries. Often times these incidences are accepted as the normal cost of doing business. The bills are paid and business continues as usual. However, these costs have a significant impact on the amount of extra business a company has to bring in in order to cover these costs. They also have the potential to greatly influence your company’s reputation, employee satisfaction, return per hour and profitability. According to Peter Drucker, “The first duty of an organization is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is NOT the maximization of profit, it is the avoidance of loss.” This serves as the foundation for the educational session titled “From Reactive to Proactive: One Company’s Journey to Optimize Operational Productivity and Safety” at this year’s TCI Expo on Friday, November 9th at 4:30pm.
In this presentation you will hear why these costs should not be considered “the cost of doing business” and the steps to take to change the business practice and mindset from accepting these costs as a normal part of business to developing and implementing a process for incident investigation and to eventually transition to a proactive and continuous improvement system.
This information presented is based on best practices and a case study of one tree care company, Rainbow Tree Care, based on Minnetonka, MN. Rainbow Tree Care wanted to optimize their business operations, particularly in their sales and production departments. They sought to increase the safety of their employees while at the same time find ways to increase productivity, improve efficiency, minimize discrepancies between sales work order specifications and actual work needs, and reduce client/company property damage. You will learn what worked well, the challenges they faced and the outcome to date. One thing they have learned is the need for systems thinking as every process, every decision is interdependent. A change or breakdown in one area often has cascading effects which ultimately results in unnecessary costs, employee frustration and client dissatisfaction. An overview will be given of the most common breakdowns, i.e. root causes, along with their potential action steps and return on investment.
For more information on the TCI Expo and program schedule.