Page 70 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

FEDERAL EXPRESS: $
SORTING OUT A MESS

In the spring of 1992, Federal Express faced a ma- latiNI 3433ALLVAO N NI 3 H1
jor problem. As many as 4,300 packages a month
were still missing their flights, even though addi-
tional employees had been assigned to the
"minisort"—the frenzied last effort to get packages
on their assigned flights each night. Because the company "abso-
lutely, positively" guarantees overnight delivery, the packages that
missed their flights had to be put on commerical flights at a cost
of $16.60 per package. The company was spending $875,000 a
year just to ship packages that had missed their flights. A team of
twelve minisort workers was chosen to solve this problem.

A manager, Melvin Washington, headed the team, but he served
primarily as a facilitator. The team met mostly on its own time,
usually over breakfast, after spending long hours sorting packages
on the night shift. The team interviewed many fellow employees,
managers of other divisions, and staff personnel and discussed nu-
merous possible problem areas. They used a four-step creative prob-
lem-solving technique that Federal Express had taught them in con-
junction with a total quality management program.

After many hours of hard work, the team determined that several 0
factors were contributing to the problem. First, there were too
many people working on the minisort, which only added to
the confusion. Second, many of those workers didn't know
what they were supposed to do. The team recommended
that the number of minisort workers be re-
duced from 150 to 80 and that steps be taken
to improve workers' understanding of their
tasks. For example, sorting codes had been
relatively easy to memorize in the
beginning, but as the firm had
grown, more and more codes had
been added, making memorization im-
possible. The team recom-
mended that codes be posted
so that workers could see them.

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