Tiers of joy

When team members at Medway mail centre found their quality scanning compliance was dropping below target, they were determined to find out why.

But, by using tiered escalation, the team was able to work through the issue and track down the problem.

Tiered escalation is a process by which colleagues can identify and deal with problems and, if necessary, escalate to managers and directors.

‘It’s a board that we use to track our main key performance indicators and that work area managers (WAMs) use in their daily huddle when they talk with their teams about how they are doing,’ said Adrian McCabe, plant improvement manager at Medway. ‘If they see an issue, they’ll discuss it and come up with a solution as a team.’

Having recognised there was a problem, WAM Lois Boosey and her team ensured all the PDAs were set up and working properly and every item was correctly scanned. That ruled out a scanning issue.

Ultimately the team was able to track down the problem to an IT or hardware issue.

‘We worked together to ensure everyone had a PDA gun that was set up and working properly and that every item was scanned,’ said Lois.

‘When the problem arose again, we knew it was not an issue with one of the team. It suggested a hardware or IT problem, and following discussions with BT and IT, a series of tests was carried out, which confirmed issues with uploading and downloading information from the PDA guns.’

The tiered escalation process allows issues to be escalated depending on how serious they are. In this case it was raised to tier two – the shift manager’s board – and a request was submitted to IT for additional capacity. Issues can be moved all the way from tier one to tier four, which takes a problem to director level within 24 hours if necessary.

Using tiered escalation has proved popular with the team. Postman Mark French said: ‘We get the chance to give feedback on what we think the root cause is.’