Family-Owned Fabric Manufacturer

Family-Owned Fabric Manufacturer

Family-owned business applies behavior-based technology to achieve continuous improvement in productivity, quality, and safety.

By seeking and adopting best practices, a family industry with seven-plus decades of growth strives for continuous improvement in productivity, quality, and safety. After identifying priority goals for each of those areas, the executive team adopts ADI’s behavior-based technology to link and direct every performance enhancement initiative used by the organization.

Situation:

Established in 1924 this family business has enjoyed a tradition of success because its owners adhere to a policy of ongoing improvement and innovation. The organization began as a distributor of fabrics manufactured by others but evolved over the decades into a producer of mattress ticking, upholstery and unique custom and specialty fabrics. With the vision of continuing the organization’s prosperity, executives identified safety, production and quality priorities for its large textiles mill in South Carolina. However, the company chairman realized that the missing component was a unifying strategy to direct and maintain the viability of each performance improvement initiative used at the mill.

Solution Implemented:

The mill’s Chairman of the Board attended a Cambridge University presentation by Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels, founder of the behavior-based solutions organization, Aubrey Daniels International (ADI). Impressed, the chairman returned several months later (this time along with his entire executive team) for another of Daniel’s presentations. The team later unanimously agreed to implement Daniels’ Performance Management (PM) technology as the mechanism to sustain the mill’s improvement initiatives. Today, the plant’s managers and employees use PM to fulfill the accountabilities of team building, problem solving and continuous improvement. These initiatives in turn enable employees to consistently achieve safety, quality, and productivity goals.

Results of Intervention:

Using PM, this mill has successfully defined accountability goals for each performance improvement initiative used at the facility: team building, advanced problem solving and continuous improvement.
By serving as a core system to sustain improvement initiatives, PM also enables the organization to consistently achieve the goals targeted by those initiatives in areas such as safety, quality and productivity.
Along with the accountability goals for keeping each initiative vigorous, PM provides a structure for recognition and reward that results in employee satisfaction and optimal performance.