PEOPLE POWER AT XEROX : Photocopier Maker Is Counting on Team Spirit to Boost Productivity, Help Firm Regain Share
The loading dock employees at Xerox’s El Segundo plant had a problem.
Into each 45-foot trailer dispatched from the factory, they had to pack 260 copiers. But their forklifts didn’t maneuver well enough to get the job done. Time was wasted as workers shifted around crates. Copiers were damaged by the awkward equipment.
Five years ago, the problem might have gone unsolved or been left to managers or engineers to correct. But at the Xerox of 1987, forklift operator Willie Dampeer, a 20-year Xerox employee, played a key role on the interdisciplinary team that designed a forklift that moves crates from side to side and not just up and down.
The result: It takes two hours, instead of three, to load a trailer. Damage is way down. And Dampeer feels like he’s somebody important at Xerox, a multinational company with 100,000 employees and nearly $10 billion in annual sales.
“You’ve got a company that’s willing to work together,” said the 40-year-old Dampeer. “That definitely improves quality, and it improves output 100%.”
Xerox is counting on the team spirit of Dampeer and thousands of other front-line workers to accomplish what few other American manufacturing firms have been able to do--reclaim leadership in a business it invented and dominated, only to see U.S. and, especially, Japanese competitors wrest away market share and the edge in innovation.
To an extent attempted by few other companies, Xerox during the past decade has undertaken a top-to-bottom recasting of its corporate culture, struggling to reassert itself as a scrappy competitor that values customer satisfaction above all else.
The conversion has relied on an unprecedented training program, undertaken at the expense of short-term earnings. By next year, all of Xerox’s employees, including about 5,000 in the Southland, will have completed at least 48 hours of schooling in “Leadership Through Quality,” a problem-solving system that teaches workers to think of everyone their work affects--whether the next fellow on the assembly line or the purchaser of a $30,000 copier--as a customer to please.
The returns are promising. Xerox products have earned top reliability ratings from Dataquest, the San Jose-based market research firm that specializes in high-tech industries. Manufacturing costs have dropped, thanks to the cost-saving innovations of teams like Dampeer’s. New products are getting to the market faster. And, according to Dataquest, Xerox last year increased its share of the worldwide copier market for the first time in the 1980s.
“If you really believe high quality gives you lower costs, that’s when you really start to make progress,” explained David T. Kearns, chairman and chief executive. “You can’t blink.”
The changes at Xerox were dizzyingly evident last week in El Segundo. In an atmosphere that was part carnival, part science fair, the firm celebrated “Teamwork Day,” an annual event that honors innovative employee teams and gives customers and other Xerox employees a taste of the people power that is reinvigorating the company’s self-image.
To outsiders, the speeches at a rally recognizing top-performing teams and the displays set up in two warehouselike buildings were a bit befuddling.
The Leadership Through Quality training has given workers in jobs ranging from sales to engineering to administration a common language. But the jargon--the talk of “the eight-step quality improvement process,” of “determining process capabilities” and “process discipline”--and the flowcharts used to illustrate the planning process are almost impenetrable to the uninitiated.
Effort Praised
The results, though, are easier to understand. One team saved the company $1.2 million by restructuring a nationwide telecommunications system. Another salvaged 10 co-workers’ jobs by retraining hardware engineers to become software designers--a project that cost Xerox $10,000 but saved $383,000 in severance costs the firm would have spent had it laid off the workers.
“Employees really are taking ownership over opportunities to improve the business,” said A. Barry Rand, president of the company’s U.S. marketing organization.
Rand and other top Xerox executives acknowledge that the company has borrowed many of its new ideas from others, including its Japanese nemeses. Employee involvement programs--reflections of the “quality circles” long used by Japanese firms to solve problems--have spread through American business in the past decade. Companies have long compared their products and systems with the competition, the “benchmarking” process that Xerox has made basic in all its business planning.
But analysts say Xerox’s commitment to involving employees in quality improvement is exceptional. “There is not an aspect of Xerox’s business that they have not applied this scrutiny to,” said Mary Lou Demers, a research analyst at Dataquest. “It’s not just lip service.”
Not everyone at Xerox has bought into the new approach. Kearns said the company’s best-performing unit is a year behind the schedule of goals top management set when it launched the quality program in 1984. And he continues to get letters from employees who say their managers fail to adhere to the program’s principles of customer satisfaction, teamwork and benchmarking.
Amid the Teamwork Day booths--where teams competed for attention with giveaways, mimes, magicians, slide shows and contests--some workers looked sullen and uncomfortable.
“I have no idea why they do all this,” said one eight-year employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of supervisors’ reprisals. “A lot of people are wondering the same thing--why we’re spending dollars internally, why we are selling Xerox to Xerox.”
More Receptive
But customers wandering through the displays seemed sold on the deep-seated changes lurking beneath the slogans and hoopla.
“They’ve moved from being almost a monopoly that almost didn’t return our phone calls to a company that’s really gotten close to the customer and receptive to our ideas,” said Jim Warren, president of Kinko’s Graphics, the Santa Barbara-based company that operates 400 photocopying shops nationwide.
“At one point in time, we did do a lot more business with IBM and Kodak, and were even investigating the Japanese companies,” Warren said. “Now Xerox is getting back a lot of our business.”
