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Less Control, More Accountability
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Work Life at Modular Services Company: Less Control, More Accountability
Modular Services Company makes custom products. Over the last 39 years we have been perfecting our ability to listen to our customers and create what they need. Along the way we have learned a lot. At MSC we want to pioneer radical innovation for our clients through total product design. We make it a goal to create and do what others cannot or will not do. Learning to do this well has been a journey. One of the most important things we have learned is that if we are going to offer each customer the opportunity to make custom changes to the unit they select, then we better be experts at all levels. Because we offer custom products to the customer every day, everyone on the MSC team must be in a continual learning process within their expertise. We rely on our team to ultimately satisfy every need, challenge and question a customer may have. We do this by demonstrating less control but more accountability within our team.
This means that our estimators, sales representatives, engineers, clinical designers, researchers and production specialist can make their own decisions to help and provide for our clients. Each team member can think on their own to be able to respond to the customer accurately and quickly. Team members must be willing to learn with each new opportunity to deepen their expertise, but most of all, they must own the decisions they make and the knowledge they pass on. Because we want to offer radical innovation to our clients, we have empowered the MSC team to act.
With less control and more accountability we have positioned our team members to be free thinkers and innovative in their position, but each person realizes that if you cannot tell someone why you made a particular decision then you probably made the wrong decision. It also means that from the largest decision to the smallest decision, everyone is free to offer an innovative ideas or pioneer a change and improvement, but everyone will be accountable.
To make this idea easier, MSC has implemented a Wiki-like system for all product and company documentation. The most famous wiki system is Wikipedia. “Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page.” We recently launched our own wiki where documents can be viewed and improved by anyone on the team. This means that if someone notices a need for a change in work flow or submittal procedure, they have the ability and are encouraged to correct the problem even if they are not in the submittal department. Everything is being reviewed by everyone with the ultimate goal of perfection. Perfection in our documentation, our processes and operations, our response time on everything, our product throughput and so much more. The wiki gives everyone a voice, each person can make a change on anything in the system, but each change in the documentation is flagged to the user so everyone can see who made the change and what the change was. This reduces control of each person but forces loads of accountability. The information to gain perfection is within the team. A wiki system gives us a place to demonstrate our value of less control and more accountability.
This is another example of our dedication to innovation, as we pioneer new territory in everything we do.
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