EVANGELISM

In 1985 I took a position to become a evangelist for the Defense Commissary Agency at Fort Lee Virginia.  What the higher management desired was a new system of management; Total Quality Management.  This new method was modeled after Tom Walmart who had taken a Japanese theory and turned it into a huge grocery retail business.  Doctor Edward Demning tried to tell the United States businesses that this would cut their expenses while improving quality.  The American businesses would not accept this idea and continued to use their idea of management from the top down to the bottom of their organizations.

Then Demning went to Japan and they had been producing junk in almost everything business they ran; but jumped at this new idea of continuous process improvement, or Total Quality Management.  Soon Toyota and Honda began to make new cars that we of high quality and inexpensive.  Americans began to buy these automobiles and liked what they bought.

When I first arrived at DeCA I had already read a great deal about this management concept and began being sent all over America and to parts of Europe to train trainers to go back into their stores and show their store workers how it worked.

One slogan that was replaced was:  "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it!".  The new slogan was:  "Everything can be improved because nothing is perfect!"  Middle management was quick to accept this concept but upper management did not want to give up their power of top down management.  I spent many days and weeks meeting with these higher management personnel and some of them were military.  I had to be honest with them and although it took time and enormous effort on my part, I finally persuaded them that their boss, a one-star General Officer would reflect that on their yearly evaluations. Like a large ocean liner, the organization began to turn around and soon it became the main objective to provide commissary customers higher quality products at much more reasonable cost.

Part of this success was due to the training of store workers themselves; these were called :Process Action Teams and they followed specific steps in order to improve their individual process they themselves were working in their respective stores.  This meant that after one week of intensive training the team would return to their jobs and collect data for about three months.  When they came back together again they analyzed all their data and then developed recommendations to their senor leaders in each commissary.  The results were amazing.  When measured "damaged good" which included dented cans, spoiled fruit, meat, etc. they assessed that cost and then put into place their recommendations and later measured again.  They had reduced their waste by over 50% and then they analyzed that cost and came up with a yearly savings.   These results were sent to all the other commissaries who also took action.  Another one was that each store had people who did nothing else than to pay the vendors statements which showed how much each store owed their vendors.  Each region consolidated all this bill paying into one small staff at the region headquarters with a net savings of over 12 million dollars a year.

After documenting all these process improvements at DeCA headquarter where I and four others worked, we applied for the Malcome Balridge Award which was open to all American companies to show their quality program results.  We submitted our application and placed third in this national award contest.  Our General Officer went to Washington DC to accept the award.

After I retired I learned that the next Director disbanded the whole program and that was because he thought that the top down management approach was better....he was so wrong.  My supervisor went on to work at the Pentagon and became the Chief of another Division.  He is now retired and is a friend of mine on Facebook.  My eight years working for that Agency was the best of my 26 year career with the Department of Defense.  Now there is a more in Congress to close many commissaries around the world.  What our military families have paid at their local commissaries will soon go up and many of them will be closed.

I was hired as a consultant after I retired and worked for two weeks when they decided that they were going to cancel all their consultants at Headquarters DeCA at Fort Lee, Va.