Creating a Lean Culture of Accountability

So, YPO had some really nice things to say about us that we’d like to share.

“Rehrig Pacific has evolved tools and methods that now deliver stunning efficiency and generate significant benefits in cost, production and accountability within, and across all their corporate sites.”

We have decades of expertise in everything related to supply chains. But when we took a good hard look at ourselves in the early 2000s, we realized we had some room for improvement in our internal work chain—a process that begins by identifying our mission, all the way down to individual tasks that help us fulfill it.  We were approaching plastics and polymers and pallets with scientific attention, but at times the execution of our mission was… kind of improvisational.

Many of us have probably had experience working with a manager that couldn’t or wouldn’t be clear about expectations or provide workable feedback. We all want to do a good job, but “just do a good job” isn’t enough instruction even for really bright, motivated people. It’s great to be a self-starter; it’s not great to follow a vague path and find out later it was the wrong one.

Vagueness is the enemy of accountability, and it sure isn’t scientific. That’s why Rehrig Pacific got rid of it. By laying out crystal clear expectations and top priority tasks, we’ve made our employees’ work lives easier, more productive and more accountable all at the same time. Engineers love specificity, and our obsession with the physics of the supply chain requires understanding on a microscopic level. When we applied that rigorous, scientific approach to how we work, we figured out how to work better. A lot better. And our clients (you) reap the rewards just as much as our employees do, with that “stunning efficiency” driving us all forward.