We recently held a webinar on Field Service 2.0: Bringing Best Practices To & From the Front Lines…Everyday. Guest speaker, Heidi Anderson-Rhodes, illustrated how UGL Unicco incrementally transformed their Field Service and Maintenance Management programs by establishing a customer-centric Continuous Improvement Program. Despite being a large and diverse company, UGL Unicco dedicated themselves to making an honest assessment of areas they needed to improve, scouted out pockets of excellence from across their geographically disbursed workforce, and established a standardized library of best practices and front line solutions. A mountain of a project, certainly, but one that ultimately enabled them to better service their clients.

A few tips to establishing your own Continuous Improvement Program:

1. “Standardize” your Standard Operating Procedures- SOP’s should have a consistent format across the board

2. Tap into your organization’s subject matter experts- they’re your best resource for creating SOP’s, KPI’s, and all the other fun “process” documents that are necessary for any Continuous Improvement Program

3. Get your hands dirty! Go in the field to uncover challenges and great practices (these are happening every day and many times go unnoticed)

4. Checklists, checklists, checklists:  UGL consolidated forms from across their operations into a series of 4 easy to follow checklists – i.e. one for Operations, one for Financial & Reporting, one for Employees, and one for Health & Safety.

5. Create a knowledge repository to store best practices and Process Improvement Forms on an ongoing basis. And then encourage people to share solutions they’ve developed through a reward and recognition program.