“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself,” - Henry Ford.
With his most likely intentional choice of words, Mr. Ford was onto something. While he didn’t invent the automobile, he did pioneer the use of the moving assembly line to manufacture them. At the time, this innovative application of an existing process allowed the Ford Motor Company to produce automobiles faster and cheaper than other companies.
The important things to remember with this example are that he did not do that by himself, and it did not happen overnight. Mr. Ford may have had the idea, but it took the combined efforts of his team, a manufacturing plant full of workers, and 5 years to make it a reality.
Ford first introduced the Model T in 1908 as the “motor car for the great multitude.” His vision was to build cars everyone could buy, but his problem was how to build it inexpensively enough so the “great multitude” could afford it. That’s when he began to look at efficiency and struck on conveyor belts already in use in other industries.
After much trial and error, in 1913 Mr. Ford and his employees began using this process at the company’s Highland Park assembly plant. It worked, and Ford forever revolutionized manufacturing.
I can’t help but see parallels with the steps and processes we have been through to build our fiber-optic network and connect customers to our world-class broadband internet service.
Initially, the buildout of the network started slowly. It was not that we were doing anything groundbreaking or working with inexperienced people. We simply had to determine the standards by which we were going to build and determine the hardware and methods that made the most sense for our system. That took some time.
As time progressed and we prepared to connect customers, we had to work out processes to initiate, assign, and track work. Customer connections have 3 major steps: hanging the service drop, splicing the service drop and installing components in the home that make the service usable.
Initially we thought 1 person would be able to work most efficiently to do all the steps of a customer install, but we kept hitting a ceiling of about 8 to 10 installs a week per technician. Most months, we were averaging around 150 installs. This was not fast enough.
We spoke with other cooperatives. They were doing things in a similar fashion with similar results. To speed up production they just hired more technicians. We didn’t want to follow that model. We wanted to find a way to work more efficiently.
The team pulled together, tossed ideas around, and finally decided that we could work faster if we broke the steps up among individuals—3 steps, 3 separate technicians. We could let 1 hang the drop, another splice it and yet another install equipment in the home.
At this point, this was theory, so we planned to trial it for a month. After 2 weeks we had our answer. Divvying the work up to separate technicians enabled us to triple productivity. We surmised, and through the trial confirmed, each step in the process was so different from the others that 1 person just could not work any faster.
We had set a goal of 400 installs a month, and we achieved it the second month we instituted the new process. We had to bring in more technicians — but only a fraction of what would’ve needed if we had kept the old process.
The new process started as 1 person’s idea, but it took the team to put it into practice.
As we are wrapping up the initial buildout of our fiber-optic network, we are preparing to expand into communities located around our electric distribution system. This expansion is going to require us to think and work differently than we have up to this point. We will no longer have the benefit of already owning the poles and other infrastructure on which we are placing our fiber. But we will make it work.
We at Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative are blessed. We have a wonderful team of employees all pulling in the same direction to move us forward.
We hope that you and your loved ones are starting the New Year with many blessings.