From the shop: Drip, drip - you lose
1 Jun, 2005 By: Harry Smith Landscape ManagementI once saw a supervisor load a rake, a bag of seed and a bag of fertilizer into his personal pickup truck at the end of the day.
You have a leak. It's cash flowing out of your company ... in small drips. What's causing these leaks? Let's look at three possibilities: 1. Shrinkage (a.k.a., theft) 2. Waste 3. Inefficiency.
Let's start with your hand tools — your pruners, rakes, shovels and other small hand tools, and your expendables like trimmer line. What is it? Theft? Waste? Or is it plain old sloppiness and inefficiency?
Or maybe it's all three. It's very possible you have three problems instead of one.
Theft is always a problem. I once saw a supervisor load a rake, a bag of seed and a bag of fertilizer into his personal pickup truck at the end of the day. This was done in full view of the crew.
All the lectures, ethics training and admonitions about not stealing from the company can't touch the unspoken statement this supervisor made. Behavior that's modeled gets copied. This also holds true for the quiet, tacit acceptance of theft by supervisory personnel. You must fix this problem. It will only grow and your losses will increase as time goes on.
Waste is another matter, especially of fuel, oil, trimmer line and other expendables. If you do not control this inventory to some extent and convince your employees of the value of these items then they will be wasted.
Compare different crews' uses of expendables; it might surprise you. Build incentives into conservation of expendables. These expendables are recognized as valuable in and of themselves. Employees also view them as a source of potential reward if they are conserved.
Finally, sloppy inventory control in the shop and on the service trucks will produce a heavy flow of losses.
You cannot control all losses because it costs too much. A $900 a month employee dedicated to preventing $90 worth of monthly losses doesn't make sense, but consider other ways to control inventory.
If each tool has a dedicated storage spot on the truck and in the shop then inventory is quick and painless. Just look. Is there an open hole? Aha! There is a hole where the rake belongs. Where is that rake? If all the trucks are set up the same way with an eyeball inventory system then the perennial problem of leaving tools on the job site is greatly relieved.
Take care of these small leaks. If they're allowed to continue they will become a flood, a flood of money leaving your operation.
— The author is turf equipment professor at Lake City Community College, Lake City, FL. Contact him at
smithh@lakecitycc.edu.
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