What once was frowned upon has now become very common. Off-site designing and off-site sales individuals or teams can be a very good way to expand your company’s capabilities. The biggest driver of its emerging acceptability is the fact that the pool of talent is larger when looking nationwide. However, the actual application of the practice may expose some troubling obstacles within your company. Here are the three areas your company should look to improve to prevent costly mistakes and improve the design and the sales capacity.
The lack of formal written standards for the groups can be a huge time productivity killer. What a company believes to be its design and sales standards normally have been discussed through verbal communication, but most companies do not have true standards. Formal written standards can be used for bringing new designers and salespeople up to speed on your company’s practices much quicker and for defining uniform design and order processing practices. The simple act of creating written standards within a design group can create a better means by which to judge the group’s successes. Also, without formal written standards, communication is hindered because the group has often never taken the time to describe the standards in a clear and concise manner. Of course, all salespeople believe they are somehow exempt from formal standards and try to circumvent the what, how and who for processing their projects. Save your people a lot of arguing and headaches by creating formal, written design and sales standards.
Managing the design group is often performed by the design manager handing out the projects and waiting for the group to return them as they are completed. There is little actual monitoring of task completion, and the scheduling is often lax, to put it mildly. Ponder this simple question when it comes to properly managing the design group: why is it that every company believes it is an absolute necessity to schedule every order being processed in the manufacturing to manage the limited resources, yet the limited resources of the design group are somehow totally different? Why is it okay to state to the sales team that their project will be processed “sometime next week,” yet any order scheduled for delivery through the manufacturing process which uses far more company resources can be scheduled to an exact date? When it comes to off–site designing, both the in–house and off–site design personnel should be provided with an expected schedule with allowances for the unknowns for all the work being processed to keep your sales team better informed. A good thing for the manufacturing management practices is also good for the design groups’ management practices (see the previous article, “Critical Part Missing from Six Sigma and Lean Practices for Most Companies”).
The most overlooked and little-understood aspect of the off–site designer or sales team members is communication. Communication is often a hodgepodge of e-mails, phone calls, Dropbox file sharing and the plate vendor management software used for scheduling at most of the component companies. This type of communication system is a system which forces people to synchronize scattered bits of information constantly, so they are often wasting valuable time making sure something is not forgotten or overlooked. Most believe they are wasting a minimum of an hour every day just trying to find answers for multiple projects being processed. Just stop and think about how many times you have to make or receive a phone call for project status updates. This type of communication system exposes and exacerbates your poor communication processes when you have off–site personnel needing critical information immediately. Too often the phrases “I was not told” or “it was never sent to me” are being used by design or sales teams because of their communication system. When you consider the cost of expanding either the design or sales team members, which do you think is more expensive? A better form of a communication system where everything is consolidated into a shared web-based system or the cost of a single new employee? (The number one component manufacturing solution: http://todd-drummond.com/appwright/)
The three main aspects of making off-site personnel work efficiently within your company that should be properly addressed are formal written standards, scheduling with allowances for unknown issues and the actual communication processes. If you want to manage and create more capacity for the design and sales teams with fewer mistakes, then improve these critical areas. Your company will improve the bottom line just as effectively as if you were improving the manufacturing processes.
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