Many landscape company owners can discover helpful operational strategies when talking to their peers about how they do business. However, you don’t have to just limit yourself to looking at the landscape industry for ingenuity.
If you are looking for new methods of efficiency, check out some of the practices from other industries that may be beneficial for your business.
1. Conduct Gemba Walks
Gemba walks are a common practice in manufacturing with ‘gemba’ meaning ‘actual place’ in Japanese. Originating from the Toyota Motor Corporation, this is where leaders regularly review a process from start to finish through direct observation and inquiry before taking action. This practice can be particularly useful if you have multiple branch locations.
Visiting your different branch locations’ yards to watch morning roll-out can identify bottlenecks such as fueling or where trucks and equipment are staged. You can also visit job sites and review how crews tackle tasks first-hand.
Gemba walks aren’t meant to be a surprise inspection. Employees should be made aware when they will take place and encouraged to provide their insights with the leadership team.
2. Ask The 5 Whys
Another concept introduced and used by Toyota is the approach of asking ‘why’ five times to uncover the real issue of a problem.
This helps your team get past surface level responses and discover the true root of the problem. If you aren’t identifying the actual cause of the problem, you will be unable to find a lasting solution. For example, say your crews are always late to the first job of the day.
Why? Well, they’re late leaving the yard. Why are they leaving the yard late? The trucks aren’t fully loaded in the morning. Why aren’t the trucks fully loaded in the morning? Crews are waiting on materials and tools. Why are they waiting on materials? The materials aren’t staged the night before. Why aren’t materials staged the night before? No one owns the responsibility of end-of-day staging.
This reveals the problem isn’t poor time management but rather a missing ownership process.
3. Practice After-Action Reviews
In the 1970s, the U.S. Army developed after-action reviews as a way to learn from missions without assigning blame. These are short 10 to 20-minute debriefs that compare what happened to what was supposed to happen. Participants discuss what went well, along with what should be improved and what will be done differently in the future.
AARs can be ideal after major snow events, large installs or the transition from one season to the next. These need to take place immediately, not months later, so mistakes can be corrected in real time.
For instance, if after a snow event, route timing was off and salt usage exceeded estimates, focus on what the team can control. An AAR can reveal that route maps weren’t updated or that a driver wasn’t trained properly on spreader calibration. These are straightforward changes that don’t result in finger-pointing.
4. Implement A Pit Crew Model
NASCAR’s pit crews are able to change tires, refuel and make repairs in under 12 seconds typically. While you’ll never be able to get crews out of the yard that quickly, the concept of developing highly coordinated, specialized teams can get you a faster turnaround for morning roll outs.
Instead of having crew members wandering about, grabbing tools and pitching in where they’re needed, each member of your crew should have specific responsibilities. One person handles loading equipment, while another ensures the truck is fueled and conducts the final walk-around. When everyone has a specific job and knows exactly what to do, they can move through the process much faster.
5. Utilize Shadow Boards
Another easy win that can boost organization within your shop is the utilization of shadow boards, which originated in the automotive and aviation industries, as missing tools can stop production and create safety risks.
By creating outlined shapes for your different equipment, everything has its proper place both in the trailer and in the shop. It provides an easy visual cue for missing items and reduces lost tools. Crews can quickly note and act on finding lost equipment versus realizing something has been misplaced days or weeks later.
It can also make it more apparent if PPE hasn’t been taken out on the job that day.
6. Perform Tiered Daily Huddles
In hospitals and emergency services, tiered daily huddles are utilized to prevent communication failures. They help eliminate silos and escalate issues quickly. These micro-check-ins across departments provide a structured flow of communication without taking up too much time.
Crews can huddle for five minutes in the morning to discuss constraints or safety issues that have cropped up. This information is passed up to a 10-minute huddle with supervisors who decide what needs to be escalated to tier three. Tier three is a 20-minute leadership huddle where trends and issues can be addressed in a timely manner.
7. Build An SOP Video Library
In hospitality and food service, turnover is high and consistency is crucial, which is why they use short, repeatable training clips rather than written SOPs. Videos can show nuances and prevent knowledge from being trapped in one person’s head. Having recorded SOPs also prevents your team members from learning a specific individual’s approach to a task.
You can create short 2–3-minute videos on tasks like pruning or edging techniques that new employees can reference while they’re in the field versus trying to recall what they were instructed on weeks ago.
8. Employ Mystery Shopper Audits
In retail and hospitality, mystery shoppers serve as a way to gauge the customer experience objectively. If you pride yourself on how quickly you get back to your clients, test this claim by having a staff member or trusted third-party pose as a potential client.
Track your lead response time, overall professionalism, and the sales team’s follow-through. You can also use mystery shopper audits to assess how well your staff vets leads before moving them too far along the pipeline.
You may discover that email follow-ups are extremely delayed, proposals lack next steps, or sales members aren’t ensuring the lead is a true fit first. These are all gaps that you can then work to improve for a stronger close rate.
