On a typical day at Queensboro we process hundreds of orders and produce thousands of custom embroidered and printed polo shirts, t-shirts, hats, jackets, bags and many other types of merchandise.\u00a0\u00a0No two orders are ever the same.\u00a0 Rarely are two items exactly the same.\u00a0\u00a0There are literally thousands of mistakes we can make every day.\u00a0 A day doesn\u2019t go by that we don\u2019t make a few.\u00a0\u00a0One of our top three goals of the year was to change our mindset when it came to mistakes.\u00a0 Rather than feeling badly when we mess up, we have tried to get everyone in the company excited when a mistake is recognized as errors present our easiest view of opportunities to improve.<\/p>\n
Identifying a mistake that is made repeatedly is a great thing.\u00a0 It is an obvious opportunity to improve a process.\u00a0 Identifying a mistake that is simple human error is also a great thing because it shows where the process is vulnerable to fail with constant repetitions.<\/p>\n
One of the things that is interesting about being in business for such a long time (35+ years!) is the new ways we find of making mistakes.\u00a0 For example, we recently took a direct hit from Hurricane Florence and while we were preparing and discussing how to minimize potential damage, no one thought to say \u201cWe better make sure that if we lose power and can\u2019t produce, for each day we miss, we add a day to the promised delivery date for orders placed on the web site.\u00a0 We are going to need some time to catch up when we re-open.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our promised delivery date is a relatively new tool for us and one we\u2019re still perfecting.\u00a0 The last time we had a plant shut down, not only weren\u2019t we closed long enough to impact our delivery schedule, but we had not yet developed the ability to guarantee customer delivery dates at the time an order was placed.<\/p>\n
A couple of opportunities came from this mistake.\u00a0 We came back to work with a big backlog of orders.\u00a0 Plus, more orders were coming in every day as we were just getting into our busy season.\u00a0 Somehow, though, the production team found an extra gear to shift into and produced at levels we had never thought possible. We are now working on sustaining those new production levels and have proven we are capable of much more than we thought.<\/p>\n
From this mistake we also got the opportunity to learn by experience that while production lead times are important, transparency and proactive communications are even more important.\u00a0 We have been good at this in the past, but we have not been great.\u00a0 We learned from this mistake that our production calendar must be the primary driver of earning our customers\u2019 trust.\u00a0 If we commit to a delivery date, we need to ship the order perfectly and on time or be prepared to explain what is going on proactively to the customer before the deadline has passed.<\/p>\n
While in the past we saw ourselves as a small business at the mercy of local weather conditions, the carelessness of our scheduling mistake showed us we were now playing in the big leagues.\u00a0 This expanded our vision of who we were.\u00a0 We learned that our customers see us as a large national organization and that opened our eyes to see ourselves that way.<\/p>\n
We know the next time a Hurricane is predicted, (and there will be a next time) we need to start planning early, not under pressure, and keep asking the question \u201cHow bad could this really be – what have we forgotten?\u2019\u00a0 We need to take our planning more seriously.\u00a0 Our customers expect that of us.<\/p>\n
It is impossible to predict when our next business shut down will be.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t do badly during Florence, but next time we will do better.\u00a0 We will not forget about the delivery calendar, we will stay available for our customers, and we will make sure to communicate early and often.\u00a0 We now think about risk in a much more serious way and we are going to be better partners because of it.<\/p>\n
In many ways, our scheduling mistake forced us to grow up.\u00a0 That is a little scary, but ultimately a great opportunity!<\/p>\n
Coming up next week \u2013 What\u2019s the biggest mistake you have made running Queensboro and what did you learn from it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Becky in our art department asks – \u201cWhat mistakes have you made that have turned into opportunities?\u201d On a typical day at Queensboro we process hundreds of orders and produce thousands of custom embroidered and printed polo shirts, t-shirts, hats, jackets, bags and many other types of merchandise.\u00a0\u00a0No two orders are ever the same.\u00a0 Rarely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}