Creating a Useful Suggestion Program
Our consultants help you develop a simple, easy to administer Innovate Program to get employees to share their ideas in safety improvement/risk reduction, scrap reduction, quality improvement and more. Innovate is designed to avoid the pitfalls plaguing most suggestion systems, and to challenge employees to implement their own ideas instead of expecting management to do it.
Everything was kept simple. Employees submitted a narrative explaining an idea with an estimated cost, benefit and savings that was then signed off by their manager.
For a cost of $25,000 per year (less than half of what was budgeted!), the program earned a documented $2.2 million in savings and “cost avoidance” the first year and a half, delighting management and was written up as an innovative best practice by the Department of Energy.
We carried all inventory, tracked all administration for the organization, and even allowed employee points to be redeemable “forever.” One enthusiastic couple took a camping trip using 100% of the camping equipment earned from the program!
The company benchmarked with several organizations including Florida Power & Light, who had previously won the prestigious Baldrige Award for quality. (FP&L had good success with a program they did in conjunction with Bill Sims Company as well.)