1) Training for hourly employees was inconsistent. Team leaders and NTLs badly needed formal leadership training, but that only happened once during my tenure. I did my best to teach them based on my own experience, but it was difficult to hold them to a high standard when their peers were not held to the same standard. Overall, I noticed that disciplinary action was often the quicker and easier method when often the employee needed more training. 2) We always struggled with housekeeping inconsistency. I inherited a very bad area of the RMC, and after about a year it met my high standard. The inconsistency among the other teams' assigned areas demoralized my team because they had worked so hard and their supervisor (me) wasn't able to get my peers on board. I fought that battle for over 3 years. Safety and productivity ruled supreme - everything else fell by the wayside when we got busy. 5S never fully got integrated into our daily standard work. 3) Pactiv is truly a manufacturing company - distribution is an afterthought. Production built inventory we didn't need, and even with all our crossdock and direct ship opportunities, we still had overflowing bins. At one point we had to lease another warehouse to store overflow product that didn't move for months. It usually felt like were fighting against Production - we had contradicting goals and metrics. Production was rewarded for building pounds, and Distribution was rewarded based on shipping productivity and efficiency. The more direct ship and crossdocking we did, the better we scored. When we're having to consolidate bins to make room for overflow materials that can no longer fit in their assigned storage section, that was waste injected into the process. Basically we could not all be rewarded together, so that resulted in an "us versus them" mindset instead of a teamwork mindset. When we got rewarded, Production wasn't. It was a very frustrating business model, and change was very slow. In almost 5 years, I never saw this change fully. Production would try to reduce inventory, and then the flood gates were suddenly opened again.
