Employee Suggestions Take on Weight in Lean Times : Business: The system is being used to improve firms’ efficiency. As a result, billions are saved each year.

The grandmasters of “employee involvement”--the ever-growing squad of management consultants who preach that companies cannot stay competitive unless they listen to the folks on the shop floor--ought to commission a statue of Urban Bianchi, the undisputed king of the suggestion box.

Tell the sculptor to capture Bianchi at home in Pico Rivera. Have him pose on the den couch or by his swimming pool, a gym bag full of loose papers at his feet. It’s there--away from the machine shop--that he works his gritty magic, putting in a couple of hours after work most afternoons, jotting and diagramming ways to perform his job more efficiently.

His output is unparalleled. In 10 years with Parker Hannifin Corp.’s Irvine and City of Industry aerospace plants, Bianchi has authored more than 800 cost-cutting suggestions that have been accepted by his bosses.

A machinist who works as a supervisor in quality control, Bianchi devotes himself to streamlining the arcane process in which workers and computers inspect small aircraft parts for flaws of a thousandth of an inch.

His unending stream of written suggestions, often accompanied by detailed diagrams, have been known to drive company engineers batty. He has been called a nit-picker. More often he has been called a gem--particularly in an economy in which companies are desperate to cut costs.

“I’ve always said that if I were starting a new company today, he’d probably be the first guy I’d hire,” said Jim Rasnick, cost-reduction manager for Parker Hannifin’s air and space division.

“He is the most prolific I have ever heard of,” said Cindy McCabe, president of the 49-year-old National Assn. of Suggestion Systems.

The suggestion box has been around the American workplace for nearly a century. However, during much of that time it has been used sparingly by businesses and viewed skeptically by workers.

Employees in past decades were often conditioned to follow management’s system, not to think independently or expansively--the very qualities that business experts now maintain are crucial to a company’s success in a globally competitive environment.

In a nation of 200,000 companies that employ 50 or more people, only about 6,000 firms are believed to operate suggestion systems. About 1,000, mostly large corporations, belong to the national suggestion systems group, which estimates that its member organizations saved $2.3 billion last year by implementing 328,000 employee ideas. That represented nearly double the savings over 1985.

Bianchi, 42, is prized not simply for his ideas, which tend to be unspectacular, nuts-and-bolts notions that save the company a few hundred dollars at a crack. He is also cherished for his bulldog attitude: He finds a piece of scrap metal that can hold a part securely to an inspection machine, allowing the machine’s computer probes to do a 360-degree inspection without the need for a human to turn the part. He substitutes plexiglass for metal to cut the cost of an inspection fixture. He combines two operations on one machine. He corrects a flawed blueprint.

“Look here,” he said the other day in Parker Hannifin’s City of Industry manufacturing plant. He held up a small thin piece of metal with six identical holes. It was part of a new idea he was submitting: a fixture to hold six gear levers so that the levers could be computer-inspected simultaneously, rather than one at a time.

“The fixture’ll cost 20 dollars to make. In the long run it’ll save ‘em six, seven thousand dollars a year” in manpower inspection time, he said. “I’m just making my job easier. I’m making the machine do the work.”

Some American companies lure suggestions from their workers by offering large cash awards. More than half of the member companies surveyed by the suggestion association offer top awards of $2,500 to $25,000.

Parker Hannifin, a Cleveland-based corporation with 30,000 employees nationwide, gives no cash prizes. Bianchi has instead been rewarded with microwave ovens, bicycles, ice chests, food processors, house tools and portable phones, plus scores of free-dinner coupons--$17,000 worth in the last four years alone, according to the company.

He says it is more than enough.

“I got so much stuff, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “Mini-vacuums, road hazard kits, fishing rods. Those things are immaterial to me. My wife has seven sisters. When I gave them radios, beach towels, they loved it. It meant more to them that I got it doing a good job, working hard, than if I’d bought it at a store.”

Bianchi worked as a Pennsylvania steel mill laborer and cross-country truck driver before settling down at Parker Hannifin in 1981. He has taken courses in drafting so he can draw his own diagrams, and other courses in computers so he can write programs to tell a parts-inspection computer how to implement his suggestions. He is the kind of guy loose enough to love taking his 17-foot speedboat to the Colorado River on weekends and tight enough to be obsessed with the need to save money by zeroing in on small production and design flaws during the week.

“If the company can’t save money, the company can’t stay in business,” he said. “I’ve got to save money.”

His suggestions save his company an average of $45,000 a year, or about $600 a thought--small change, compared to the average implemented suggestion, which in 1990 saved $7,012, according to the suggestion system association. The average employee award was $491.

Suggestion system administrators are fond of saying that the desire for recognition, not cash, motivates most employees to submit ideas. In truth, it is a mixed bag.

Jesse Corbett, an engineering design specialist at IBM in North Carolina, spent parts of four months designing a tool that would drastically cut the cost of a popular cable used to transmit electronic data from a telephone-line modem. The longer he worked on it, the more conscious he became that IBM awarded $150,000 to the year’s top money-saving idea.

“To be recognized is probably the biggest motivation,” said Corbett, 45. “But then if you see the possibility of getting a check for $150,000, you may just say, ‘Damn the recognition.’ ”

He received both after IBM calculated that his work, which cut the cost of the cable from $5 a pop to a few pennies, would save the corporation $1.4 million in the first year.

Corbett said the money, which he received in 1989, has not changed him. He is still in the same job and still driving a 12-year-old Dodge with 234,000 miles on it.

Richard Taus and James Pitts, two longtime employees at the Ohio Bell phone company, made $57,000 apiece for a few hours of thinking.

They were confronted by a long-time utility engineering dilemma: the expense of having to move a manhole when a street was widened.

One evening, they designed a process that allowed the manhole to remain in place. The idea is expected to save hundreds of thousand of dollars a year, and has been patented and marketed. Ohio Bell’s Enter-Prize innovation program, established a few years ago to encourage big-ticket savings, awarded them $114,000.

“It took maybe four hours of work,” said Taus, 53, a facilities specialist who has been with the company for 34 years. “We couldn’t believe it wasn’t thought of beforehand. It’s a simple idea.”

In the years when Ohio Bell was part of the AT&T; monopoly, Taus said “outside ideas (from employees) weren’t too readily accepted.” Today, with the monopoly broken up into a system of regional phone companies that must compete with new firms, “it’s a different environment,” he said.

The biggest award of 1990 went to Gerald Niehaus, a veteran chemical equipment operator at an Eli Lilly plant in Indiana. He won $177,000 for suggesting a technique that would enable the company to reuse a greater amount of an expensive solvent instead of disposing of it as waste. Lilly’s executives calculated the award at 25% of the first-year savings.

It is a far cry from 1898, when Kodak’s George Eastman founded the first known suggestion system, awarding a $20 prize to a worker who suggested that someone should wash the windows in a film-slitting room. Or 1928, when A.P. Giannini, the founder of Bank of America, gave his chauffeur a $1 bonus for proposing that the bank begin issuing traveler’s checks.

It was Bianchi’s good luck to arrive at Parker Hannifin just as the company was establishing an aggressive suggestion system aimed at cost-cutting. He was hired as a machinist in the hydraulics division in Irvine.

In his first two years there, Bianchi submitted 10 ideas.

In his next two, he submitted 168.

Eighty-five percent of the ideas were accepted by the company, remarkably high compared to the national suggestion acceptance rate of 25% to around 30%.

The ideas went beyond Bianchi’s immediate responsibilities. Wherever he saw too much scrapped material or work that had to be redone, he proposed altering production. He suggested changes in manufacturing techniques to eliminate deviations.

Bianchi was the hydraulics division’s employee of the year in 1983 and 1984 and the National Assn. of Suggestion Systems’ “Suggester of the Year” in 1984.

In 1987, Bianchi shifted to the company’s air and space division in the City of Industry. He now keeps track of all his suggestions on a computer. He can tell you that he made 31 suggestions in June, 1987, and had 23 accepted. He has been the air and space division’s employee of the year twice, the employee of the month 10 times and the employee of the quarter four times.

“He’s probably put in as many suggestions as everyone else in the division combined,” said Louis Heil, who oversees the engineers who evaluate suggested changes.

Bianchi knows he is lucky. He works for a company that is sincere about its commitment to new ideas. The suggestion business is uneven. Supervisors in charge of suggestion programs are often asked to split their time among other duties. Higher management is notoriously uneven in its response to the programs. Employee cynicism is hard to break down.

“Some companies have had some really poor experiences in the past,” said Brienn Woods, a San Diego business consultant who specializes in employee-involvement programs. “It’s a tougher culture change because it’s something that’s gotten a bad rap: the suggestion box in a corner gathering dust, or a boss who implements your idea and you don’t get credit. We have to turn the image around,” she said.

“You have to get people on the bandwagon,” Bianchi said. “When you start making suggestions, you start thinking about your job differently. I’ve tried to train myself to do that.”

One day last year Bianchi happened to look at an accumulator, a small $500 valve, that to his eye simply looked wrong. He checked it against the blueprint. It looked right. Then he checked the blueprint. It looked right, too, until he mathematically checked the dimensions and found a tiny error that placed a hole off center. The error was so small that the part still functioned, but Bianchi believed that there was a potential problem. He suggested a design change, which was accepted. He was awarded another prize.

“I don’t care about the prize,” Bianchi said. “I care that we’re not going to have to trash any more $500 parts.”

Making a Suggestion

About 1,000 organizations, with approximately 13 million employees, are members of the National Assn. of Suggestion Systems. They report a sharp increase in savings from employee suggestions in the past six years.

YEAR EMPLOYEE SUGGESTIONS PERCENTAGE ADOPTED SAVINGS 1985 1.33 million 25% $1.25 billion 1986 1.24 million 26% 1.82 billion 1987 1.02 million 24% 2.0 billion 1988 1.01 million 29% 2.2 billion 1989 .996 million 32% 2.0 billion 1990 1.02 million 32% 2.3 billion

SOURCE: National Assn. of Suggestion Systems