In-Sink: Better Every Year

By Dean Sink, Mickey President
It?s time to put a bow on 2015, which for the last several years has been one of the best parts of my job.

Once again we hit record levels in almost every part of our business, including safety, quality, production and sales. Our commitment for 2015 was to take our total company and all parts of it from ?good to great.? There?s no doubt we are heading in that direction at an accelerated pace.

Dean Sink

The key to our success is our company-wide commitment to teamwork. At Mickey we don?t work in departments or divisions; we work on teams. And our teams work together. That was more evident in 2015 than ever before.

Our Engineering Team is a perfect example. We have outstanding and diverse talent on this team, including expertise in refrigeration, prototyping, testing and evaluation, fabrication, materials science. But none of those skillsets are used in a silo. Rather, we work as a team to combine all of that individual knowledge to design better products for our customers and to shorten the time it takes to launch new innovations. What?s more, that collaboration extends throughout the company to include sales, purchasing, manufacturing, QC, finance. As the saying goes, the sum of our parts is greater than the whole.

We experienced the same type of success when we consolidated and strengthened our Sales Team. Now, all of our sales people are selling all of our products ? no more divisions or departments. Just one team that sells everything we make. And that team is working closely with all our other teams to ensure that every customer gets exactly what they want, when they want it.

In manufacturing, we are running at an all-time high in terms of safety, productivity and quality in all of our plants throughout the country because every single employee has fully bought into the team concept. They are working together to continuously improve the processes that that go into building world class products. They have improved their focus on their own individual tasks while at the same time looking for opportunities to help in other areas.

In Recon we?re moving beyond our traditional reconditioning expertise towards more creative retrofits like the job we just did for Black Dog Salvage. (See separate story in this issue of THE SPIRIT.) Our Recon Team is also working with our Engineering Team to develop some exciting new specialty vehicles from scratch. I?ll tell you more about that in a later installment of In-Sink.

Finally, we?re making great inroads in the implementation of our new Epicor ERP system. We?re a company that is 111 years old, and we have a lot of information, data and history to process and make relevant and useful. Like everything else we do at Mickey, we want to get it right the first time. Once this system is fully up and running, it will improve our productivity and communication across every team in every location. We will all have immediate access to actionable information; we will all be able to make better decisions to benefit our customers and our company.

At this time of year it?s great that we have so much to be thankful for. It?s even better that we have so much to look forward to.

Happy holidays and happy reading.