Reflections ... FLEET, Relationships, Lean, and Superintendent Franchise

APM Team,

Our APM Leadership Team held our Q3 Leadership Meeting two weeks ago. We took this opportunity to reflect on our business performance through the spring and early summer. A few highlights: we delivered improved field execution (especially in safety and quality), and we experienced challenges with volume and structure in the current reality (due to COVID and market dynamics within the Coal – Gas – Renewables mix). 

During our remote working session, our Team used the Lean mentality with workouts on Accountability, Readiness to Serve for Fall, our Compete KPI, and our Rigging business. We closed the session with a day focused on the broader horizon – looking beyond fall – to the next steps in our FLEET journey; relationships with our GE partners; and application of Lean to our business model and the Superintendent Franchise vision. Allow me to key in on a few of these big topics.

FLEET Refinement

Our FLEET Journey started in the fall of 2018 after 7 years of stagnancy. We will not repeat that mistake. Constant progress is required to keep pace with our customer’s needs. At that time, we made the decision to move towards more market segmentation because what wins in each segment is different.

Why change after a successful spring season?  “Success is never owned. It’s rented. And rent is due every day.” We cannot sit on success and expect to stay ahead – we must continue to improve. Each market and corresponding line of business has its own challenges. Now is the time to open the segment strategies to all for input. We see 8 boxes – What do you see?

Relationships

We return to the discussion of relationships, which is not a new topic in our organization, but is even more critical now due to the dynamics of the market and our many stakeholders (GE and our customers and our labor partners). Close partnership and collaboration with our partners drives improved execution, customer relations, efficiency, and cost savings.

As James P. Carse said “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning; an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play.” We want to continuously play the game, and to do so, we have to build relationships and help each other win. Winning means we win, our customers win, our partners win, our stakeholders win. Click here to view a previous blog post about our strive for infinite relationships. How would you describe our current relationships? Are they finite (win/lose) or infinite (continue play)?

Lean Business Model

The customer jobsite is where our value is delivered. This is our “gemba”. Too often we are trying to solve problems at high levels without going to the jobsite, whether hearing the voice of our frontline leaders or looking at data provided by those leaders. We also have too many layers creating “noise” between corporate servants and frontline field leaders. We need to lean out that noise and get our corporate servants closer to our frontline field leaders (see the Superintendent Franchise model next). In short, we are aiming to flatten the organization.

We must identify everything between the superintendent and the customer. We win when we focus on our true value – field resources that deliver excellence for the customer experience. Let’s keep doing that relentlessly – everything we do, every role, every task, must support that outcome. Let nothing else get in the way of that focus! How will you apply Lean to your role?

Superintendent Franchise Model

It is clear from the spring that the Superintendent and their field team is the APM face in front of our customer. When we win, the customer praises the Superintendent and their team (often as part of the larger GE team onsite). And when we simplify the Superintendent’s mission, we perform better. Our vision for the future is to create a team of Superintendents who operate as business owners, simply empowered by our support services and technology maintained at the headquarters. Are you ready to own your business? How can we prepare you?

Allow me to share a few samples from the Voice of our Customer:

“Hands down the 2 biggest things that GE could do to bring more value to the site is lower costs and repeatability of personnel. With the same repeatability of personnel, you gain so many efficiencies during the pre-outage phases which is greatly important to keeping the costs lower. So, I would rank the consistent personnel to site each outage would be the biggest asset to any site’s outage cost savings and efficiencies to gain. … All in all, from my standpoint, personnel repeatability is your biggest value in many ways.”

“I just want to say how great Adam and the crew were this outage … I cannot say enough with what they accomplished in such a scary time. Just an incredible job. I don’t ever remember seeing the crews as focused as they were during this outage. I WANT THOSE EXACT FEs, APM CREWS, and PM FOR EVERY OUTAGE GOING FORWARD!”

The accolades above are exciting for our APM mission and our vision of Superintendent empowerment!

This is a dynamic time in our business and industry. There are many challenges and many opportunities. We have an important mission. I want to ensure we all understand our APM value and the vision and strategies we are chasing. Therefore, I invite you to attend an Open Forum session with me and the Chiefs next Tuesday. We will send a calendar invite later this afternoon. This is a chance to ask questions and get clarification on any of the above topics. To reach success, we must all be aligned.

Thanks for all you continue to do that makes APM extraordinary.