11 Improvement Opportunities Identified at Nussbaum
Nussbaum has grown quite a bit in the past year or so. It’s exciting to see our company expand to impact more people around us, but inevitably, growing pains are present.
As we’ve grown, we’ve run into a bit of a problem.
The Growing Problem
Ben Virkler of Nussbaum’s IT team states, “The problem we are tackling is that as Nussbaum has grown, the knowledge of how and why Nussbaum works the way it does, which used to be in everyone’s head (but never written down), has been shared in a way that now there are few people who know ‘everything’ that happens end-to-end.”
Everyone knows their role, but nobody knew how all the pieces fit together. What are the things that happen in between attaining a customer and a driver getting paid?
The Solution
Ben found a process called Event Storming to help map out Nussbaum’s business flow. He comments, “Event Storming is a method for discovering the end-to-end process from a group of people who each know one part of the process.”
A representative from each department came together to help write and arrange the events of a load and identify pain points once the entire process was linked together.
The representatives were: Rick Schmidt, Peg Balducci, James Grier, Nathan Wertz, Scott Ubbenga, Brent Martin, Angie Green, Sydney Swords, Emma Zimmerman, Chris Aranda, Tyler Dietrich, and all of the IT Developers. Thank you to each participant that took time out of their schedule to make this event happen!
But Rome wasn’t built in a day and making the timeline and pinpointing issues didn’t happen all in one day either. The Nussbaum Event Storming consisted of four 2-hour sessions in total. Check out this time-lapse to see how it worked.
Ben concludes, “In the end, we had an end-to-end view of Nussbaum’s process from onboarding new customers and lanes, through building, planning, and delivering loads, to billing customers and paying drivers.”
Opportunities to Improve
Ben and the department representatives identified some pain points through all the heavy lifting in mapping this process. Ben remarks, “Along the way, there was a lot of discussion and learning, identification of problem spots, and ideas for how we can improve.”
Now begins the process of addressing and making changes to help business run more fluidly.
The three main categories of opportunities for improvement are streamlining communication, gaining efficiency, and increasing profitability.
11 Ways to Improve
Streamline Communication
- Lack of communication and miscommunications concerning damage and injury
- Trip info sent to drivers has too much unnecessary information
- Drivers get their pay info via LiNK – could we allow them to submit pay questions back through LiNK?
- Drivers and Operations lack good visibility into the progress of shop work on equipment
- Overly reliant on email – lost time over lunches/meetings, and issues are reworked by multiple people
Gain Efficiency
- Currently, Sales and Accounting do duplicate work identifying permits
- Most of the data used in the bid process is manually collected and entered
Increase Profitability
- Streamline the pricing process for 3PL Brokered Freight
- Sales/Pricing doesn’t have visibility to all customer-specific operational costs (detention, delays, accessorial, equipment damage/incidents, etc.) – this info would help them negotiate better rates
- We miss opportunities to bill accessorial charges
- Converting 3PL brokered freight to customer spot freight would increase driver satisfaction and strengthen customer relationships
What Now?
The team will dive into wrestling these issues and figuring out how best to improve our process at Nussbaum. We’ll have more updates along the way as pain points are addressed, righted or changed, and enhanced for the betterment of our employee-owners and our company.
