My
last ten years at Kodak in the Photochemicals Manufacturing Division.
The work began with Dave
McConnell’s Leadership Team, as there were several “old timers” who really
didn’t want to give up what they perceived as “power”. I never even considered
this would be a problem, as these folks reported to Dave and I assumed he had
them under control and they were on the same page as Dave and they were
interested in improving the organization rather than protecting their asses,
BUT I was dead wrong. Guys like Joe Seiler (thanks for the correct spelling
Mark), who would tell you what you wanted to hear and then do what he wanted
(hey, it’s the Ed Smith, Mr. Tomato Head behavior) and Mike Shelkun, who was in
over his head as it was, were determined to resist changes that they thought
affected them personally, and Dave expected me to “bring them around”. So,
after five or six months of selling, teaching, pushing and convincing, the
Photochemicals Leadership Team stood on the brink of accepting a new design
that broke up the responsibilities of the Leadership Team, moved Supervisor
controls down to smaller, geographic groups of shop floor individuals,
established authority levels within the new shop floor teams, and within those
shop floor teams established coordinator roles around topics like training,
safety, quality, production, human resources and financial reporting. The basic idea here, which came from the
likes of Jim Parkman, was to distribute responsibility as far down into an organization
as possible, and focus multiple, qualified individuals towards the various
areas in need of attention (safety, training, production, quality, etc) thereby
building capabilities and establish ownership. Sounds good, right? Well, it was
the right thing to do, and after a battle of months we had, as a Leadership
Team, accepted this massive change, and that’s just about the time the company
decided to execute a final, huge incentive program designed to encourage those
eligible to leave the company, to leave the company, and guess what, almost all
the Photochemicals Leadership Team left the company, along with all, ALL the
current supervisors, and most of the senior operations folks. One day they were
with us, and the next day they were gone, and I can’t help thinking, to this
day, that Dave McConnell knew this and said nothing. We were then faced with
what to do next, with NO supervisors and no senior operations folk, and a plan
to “get some of those team things” ready to implement. We did what was done at
that time in the company; we went forward anyways and sorted out the mess.
Here’s what we did:
·
We hired three new supervisors from, guess what, the
Management Services Division
·
We installed a forth supervisor from operations
within Photochemicals
·
We established four teams, one for each supervisor
·
We establish five coordinators (Production, Quality,
Safety, Training, and Maintenance) on each team
Here’s what happened:
·
The new supervisors fumbled around for a year
because they had NO training
·
Operations suffered because the “second string”
moved up without proper training
·
The new teams competed against one and another
because they didn’t understand that parts are part of a whole, and none could
afford to fail
·
The coordinators couldn’t coordinate and most of
their responsibilities were picked up by the new supervisors because the
coordinators didn’t have training OR, in some cases, capabilities
·
Dave McConnell accepted a new assignment, as I’m
sure he’d told his bosses “his team thing” was a done deal, and moved on
It was January of 1992,
operations was a mess, the “team thing” was implemented but not working, my
“sponsor” had left me holding the bag, and Mr. Lou Dossie showed up from Kodak
Apparatus (Copier Manufacturing) to replace Dave McConnell. It was yet another
new day, and Judy’s words came back again, “No body can fix Photochemicals, no
body”.
I don’t remember who it was that
said, “Hey, why’s Lou Dossie in Dave McConnell’s office?” but that was the
beginning of the next era, the Dossie era. Lou Dossie was a young manager who
had worked his way up the ranks of the Kodak Apparatus Division and had become
the top manager of the Kodak Copier efforts, managing over two thousand people
in what was, at the time, the leading edge of Kodak diversification,
product-wise. Unfortunately, Lou Dossie’s sponsor, a fellow named Trobridge,
had left the company and shortly thereafter, Lou was overthrown by some really
disreputable folks in Kodak Apparatus, guys who were famous for hideous
behaviors, and Lou ended up sitting in an office with nothing to do. I think he
sat there for about six months, and then as good fortune would have it, he
found through some Kodak Park Leadership Team member, a link to us in
Photochemicals. Dave McConnell went off to become the manager for what was now
called “Material Flow Planning” (ironically, this was the division I had
started in, used to be Production Planning), and the new Photochemicals
Leadership Team settled into place. There were holdovers from McConnell, Ralph
Holmes and Mark Quadrini remained, as did Pat Guinta and Vince Burkis, the
former representing Maintenance/Engineering and Manufacturing, and the later
Shipping/Receiving and Planning. I stayed to continue on with “the teamwork”
thing and Lou Dossie began the process of continuing on. I’m sure there was an
accountant in there as well, but frankly I don’t remember their name.
Lou Dossie was a wonderful
manager who had a few simple rules. We all had to do what we said we were going
to do, and we each had to personally improve both our skills and abilities to
deal with people. Lou also did NOT believe in staff, so we as a management team
did what other managers hired out. Here’s what we did:
·
We developed our own training programs for
operations and taught the classes ourselves. We defined and implemented
measures around safety, quality, production, training and maintenance that were
transferred to the local teams to establish ownership.
·
The Leadership Team provided directions to the
supervisors, BUT the supervisors ran the shop floor with the idea that a
transfer of responsibility was going to take effect and the supervisors would
then provide support, not direction, as the empowered workforce took control of
their own destiny.
·
Lou Dossie also brought two new individuals into the
Leadership Team. Chuck Rothhaar, from Kodak Apparatus came aboard as a general
“fixer-upper” and Rick Foster joined up as Quality Manager to drive us to ISO
9002, which we needed to accomplish to continue selling product in Europe.
We really were off to a fast
start as Mr. Dossie was truly interested in making Photochemicals a better
place. The teamwork, empowerment effort was moving along, we were training a
workforce we had determined was about twenty-five percent illiterate, the teams
were making some progress, BUT the first line supervisors, who had no training
and no time to learn the business, were picking up many of those functions that
should have been done by shop floor teams BECAUSE the operators where not
qualified to accomplish these tasks OR would not do them, which really was a
culture statement not just relevant to Photochemicals at the time, but
represented most of what old Kodak believed were the traditional dividing lines
between “management” and operations. The old “we’re not paid to think, we’re
paid to make stuff” versus the new Kodak attitude of “we all have to do more to
become cost competitive” did not translate that easy in a culture of fed by one
hundred years of monopoly and basic distrust. The seeds of trouble were in the
wind as 1992 and 1993 tumbled by.
Chuck Rothhaar and Rick Foster
were GREAT additions to the team, and we began making tremendous progress.
Photochemicals at that time was composed of several independent Departments,
each with their own budgets and processes, so Chuck began taking apart all the
burden statements and looking for over-laps and duplications. We decided, as a
team, to eliminate as many as departmental burden budgets as possible and
combine these into a single, or what really turned out to be, initially, two
burden budget efforts, one for Manufacturing and Staff and the second for
Shipping/Receiving and Planning. The Material Flow Planning Division (remember
Dave McConnell) was also reorganizing, so Pat Guinta joined them and he and
Vince Burkis were responsible for Planning. I took over as the Department
Manager for Shipping/Receiving. Rick Foster mobilized the Product Staff as well
as operations, and through the installation of Quality Coordinators, we
attacked our non-existent quality system and established new rules and
directions, as well as directives, and by the end of 1993 we had obtained ISO
9002 certification. This certification, ISO 9002, was the first at Kodak Park,
and made Photochemicals, just like it had been with the first installation of
AMAPS and obtaining MRP II Class A status in 1989, a leader across Kodak Park.
We were riding high and looking good. Lou Dossie also removed Mark Quadrini as
Manufacturing Manager, sending him to Polyester Recovery on staff assignment to
assist in the startup of a new process, and assigned Chuck Rothhaar as
Manufacturing Manager. This assignment, Chuck Rothhaar replacing Mark Quadrini
was done because Mark really had been at it too long and needed a change (even
though it took him years to get over it) and operations, which was NOT
functioning well from all measurement perspectives, needed new blood,
directions, and style. Chuck was the prefect fit, and we were off to the races.
To understand what happened next
you should know about Kodak at this time, as well as something about
Photochemicals. Let’s start with Kodak.
It was early in 1993, and the
top levels of Eastman Kodak were in disarray, to say the least. The total focus
was on cost reductions, and the Board of Directors had, basically, fired Kay
Whitmore and were in the process of finding, from the outside world, a
replacement as President and CEO. This had NEVER been done before. Mr. George
M.C. Fisher was hired with all the hoopla of a new quarterback for a
professional football team. Down in the ranks, the cost cutting measures
manifested themselves in allowing people to leave, transfer from one place like
Photochemicals to another, like Synthetic Chemicals, without being replaced.
The thought here was “Hey, one less person, saving that cost, and let’s pick up
our productivity and take advantage”. Well, that’s a good thought BUT you need
to have made some improvements to capitalize on productivity gains. Lou Dossie
had authorized the replacement of ancient cappers, spending over a million
dollars to do so, but the Photochemicals operation remained a two or three
sigma operation with six sigma goals. The company also introduced the concept
of “contractors”, which were cheap labor we could hire (no benefits) to be used
to “shore up our labor needs”, and into 1993 Photochemicals traveled with 35%
contractors, inexperienced supervisors, and an aging, second string labor force
that was trying their best but really had no chance to succeed.
Consumer imaging primarily
drives the summer seasonal for the photographic products business, summer time
photographs of trips to Disneyland, or summer activities in general, and we
were NOT prepared for the production increases. In April we had fallen behind
and an argument had broken out between the “planning” folks (Pat Giunta and
Vince Burkis) and the Operations Managers (Lou Dossie and Chuck Rothhaar). The
result was we fell severely behind in production required, with at least a
six-month timeframe necessary to catch back up. All through the summer we hired
contractors who came and went, adding nothing but headcount and expense to our
efforts. The faster we went, the further behind we got.
At the end of the year we had
allowed Distribution finished goods inventory levels to fall well below “aim”
causing business analysis’s downtown to put their martini glasses down and
become concerned enough to point out how poorly manufacturing was performing.
Our inability to build inventories back up to basic aim levels quickly (it
NEVER was confirmed that this fact ever hurt our business, which was the point
of the whole exercise) and business “managers” bitching to the Kodak Park
Leadership Team combined with yet another “rightsizing” effort (this time aimed
at mid-level managers) targeted Lou Dossie and he was fired, or better put, let
go. Lou Dossie, the best manager I’d ever worked with, was toast at the hands
of the incompetent Kodak Park Leadership Team, and Photochemicals was branded
as “that troubled spot”.
Upon his white horse, Charles
Champion rode into Photochemicals, sent by the Kodak Park Leadership Team to
“straighten out Photochemicals” just about the time our labor force stabilized
and production started to smooth out, and as sales fell off we began putting inventory
back into the system and that’s just about when Charles Champion began firing
people to “straighten things out”. Chuck Rothhaar was first to go, because
Charles (when I knew him back in Sensitizing he was just Charlie, now he was
Charles) blamed Chuck for our production problems of the previous year. I
believe both he and Rick were “dismissed” at the same meeting when Charles
began his rendition on how to calculate new metrics (using a method that was
incorrect, BUT would guarantee him success) and both Chuck and Rick pointed out
the error of his ways. Hey, as Charles told me later, “They had to go”. I was
far enough down the food chain so I was spared, and at the time I had become
Manufacturing Coordinator, a position that was responsible for what was, now,
the increasing success of Lou Dossie, Chuck Rothhaar and Rick Foster’s efforts.
We rode into and through 1994 building a pile of inventory that allowed us to
get ahead of the production seasonal, give people summer vacations without
working a ridiculous amount of overtime. Charles Champion did bring in Judy
Carlson to replace Chuck Rothhaar, thank God, and in her good graces we
weathered 1994 in style. Charles, on the other hand, was in trouble for his
dealing with Chuck Rothhaar as he really had NO grounds for the shabby
treatment and in less than six months, about June of 1994, Charles was sent to
France to, as he said to me, “Straighten out the French”. I guess Charles was
the appointed “straightner-outer” but with Judy Carlson in place we all felt
secure and ready to deal with the arrival of Harvey Berson, or as we’d come to
refer to him, “Father Photochem”.
Harvey Berson arrived to replace
Charles Champion and Judy Carlson remained in place as a sort of “buffer”
between the real world and Harvey. Harvey was the quintessential Kodak
manager/insider, as he’d spent his entire career moving up the ladder, meeting
the “higher ups”, kissing ass, pissing of no body and generally doing what he
was told. He was perfect for Photochemicals because he had, once in the mid
1970’s, been a Department Manager back when as he put it, “Everyone loved to be
here in Photochemicals”. Judy (my wife) was there at the same time and did not
remember it to be as Harvey so fondly remembered, but rather the hellhole it
always was with backstabbing and political crap. Photochemicals did have, in
the mid-seventies, and excellent staff and set of operators and mechanics that
truly did know the business and the machinery, and did have a love of one and
another, but what Harvey did not realize, nor did any one of the “higher ups”,
this had all been lost in the various downsizing, excuse me, right sizing and
cost cutting programs of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
Judy Carlson and the supervisors
(I was one) had re-organized into ever-smaller groups, called cells for
Cellular Manufacturing, and had put into place measures at this lower level to
quantify successes where success occurred and point out areas for improvement
where goals were not met. Photochemicals was humming in 1995 and through mid
1996 when, in June, Judy Carlson was promoted and left the scene to return to
Paper Manufacturing. It was now that the bell tolled for me, as Cellular
Manufacturing had been, basically, my idea, and Harvey hated it to say the
least, and Judy Carlson fought him off with our successes, but the moment she
was gone, replaced with a tragedy of a woman from Roll Coating, a displaced,
downsized former middle manager named Pat Olson, who was over anxious to please
and would do anything to be returned to what she thought was her rightful
place, middle management, Harvey swung into action and began moving
Photochemicals back to the organizational structures he’s remembered so fondly,
throwing out the last five or so years of progress and effort, and trusting his
new Operations Manager (another accountant, by the way), to “Tow the line, meet
our goals, reduce costs and improve quality”. Right.
I really don’t want to dwell on
this last few years of my career, but I will say that as Pat Olson carried out
Harvey Berson’s wishes and put things “back the way they used to be” and
performance fell off, quality went into the toilet, and people who could flee
did so. Consequently, Photochemicals once again became the target of management
and Pat Olson was first to go. After four long years, Harvey joined the ranks
of those asked to retire and he left the company just before year-end, 1999. I
can begin to say how I felt watching all our hard work thrown away by people
who really didn’t care about anything but themselves, and I’m not going to talk
about it other than to refer you to Diversions.
Dianne Newhouse came in to
replace Harvey and the generally feeling of the place became more optimistic as
Dianne had a better feel for manufacturing and reality. It was too late to
re-fix the organizational structures for me, as I no longer was in position to
influence the decisions to do so.
I spent my last year or so “managing” our way through such stupid
things as the Y2K (Year two Thousand) stupidity, and other such systems
nonsense. We did manage to implement, just before January 1st, 2000,
a new dispatching system that improved our shop floor scheduling techniques
significantly and we did also manage to direct ship about 15% of our over-all
production directly to a customer, avoiding our (Eastman Kodak’s) warehousing
operations and saving millions in time, transactions, movements and labor.
The last chance I had for
promotion was in the spring of 2000, and I was recommended for the first time
in fourteen years, and denied for the last. It was a bittersweet departure as I
left, retired, on January 29th, 2001, and was effectively retired
from Eastman Kodak Company on February 1st, 2001 after twenty-eight
years, seven months and nine days.
I just want to say a few things
about Photochemicals people.
Occasionally, you are lucky
enough to meet people you learn something from, and once in a while you can
help somebody who deserves it, and I was able to do both in my ten or so years
in Photochemicals.
·
Alex Matthews is the best man I’ve ever known.
·
Doug Hill has the most capability I’ve ever seen.
·
Ron Zauski is the purest man I’ve ever known.
·
John Robinson has the most patience I’ve ever seen.
·
Bob Kinsella has the hardest job now.
·
Leslie Hinckler has the best instincts I’ve ever
seen.
·
Lou Dossie is the best Manager I’ve ever known.
·
Dave Miroff is the steadiest person I’ve ever known.
God bless Photochemicals and all
the people there. May they be safe and happy.
For a more complete look on
where/how this page fits in, click www.howardbeatty.com
Hb.
3/24/02