How LEAN produced significant profits through Great Teaming

Several months ago we arrived early at the TDIndustries San Antonio Office to set up for a class the next day. Jerry Millership, HVAC Service Manager, and two other Partners were working on a project on one side of the room, and we asked permission to pull up a chair and quietly observe so we could learn more about their work. They welcomed us and explained that they were applying LEAN strategies and skills to a new project, which was upgrading eight schools over a nine month period.

There were yellow Post-It notes neatly lined up across the wall, with each noting a step in the project and the estimated amount of time needed to complete the work estimated. In about two and a half hours, these three team leaders had found creative ways to back approximately 80 hours out of the job’s schedule. If this was achievable, it would mean significant profit simply by creatively finding ways to work more efficiently.

Jerry served as our Class Sponsor for an Introduction to Servant Leadership class a few months later and reported that the job had indeed been completed in record time and the profit was even greater than originally projected—12% higher or $642,000 profit. This teamwork applying LEAN strategies had produced a 39.64% margin!

We celebrate the unlimited benefits of teaming through Servant Leadership to achieve aggressive performance improvement. So often, people attend classes which teach new skills and then go back to work, leaving behind valuable new learning and strategies. Not so with this group! Partners at TD work hard to harness the benefits of every new leadership, teaming, quality or performance skill to consistently and safely deliver quality jobs at a lower cost to our Customers and with higher margins for TD. It sounds like an “either/or” situation, but TD proves that it can be a “both/and” result….both lower cost to our Customers AND higher margins for TD by working collaboratively to find more creative solutions.

Hats off to our TD Partners for continuous, aggressive performance improvement, which is part of TDIndustries’ mission:

We are committed to creating great careers

by exceeding our Customer’s expectations

through continuous aggressive performance improvement.